Nobody has mentioned the effect of cloud syncing on battery life. Apple's devices have strong media creation features, and the data they create (photos, videos

Nobody has mentioned the effect of cloud syncing on battery life. Apple's devices have strong media creation features, and the data they create (photos, videos, and audio recordings) can be quite large. Syncing this data immediately to the cloud requires juice to power the processor and the network, even while using Wi-Fi. Even existing cloud sync of push-based email, which is relatively little data, has an appreciable effect on battery life. I wouldn't be surprised if cloud-sync increased the power cost of photo and video creation by 10x over 3G. USB sync is faster, but more importantly, requires much less power. In fact, for some devices there can be a net gain of charge through USB power. I suspect Apple is pushing off cloud sync until it can deal with this issue without compromising its high standards of battery life. Cloud sync. is quite useful for email, but for other things, most non-geeks would probably prefer better battery life at this point. Apple is excellent at making these kinds of hard choices. Carriers may also be prohibiting Apple from adopting cloud-sync over 3G and EDGE out of fear it will crash their networks. Android, while outselling Apple, doesn't nearly have the same effect on data rates, because a lot of Android phones are sold as "free/discounted feature phones"--users aren't using them as smartphones, they're just the neatest phone they could get for cheap at the store.