Jumping ship: how to go from iPhone to Android

Contacts, calendars, and messages

Before you throw away your iPhone, you may want to sync it one last time, and tell iTunes to send your contacts to a service, such as Google’s own contacts service.

So plug the iPhone in and load up iTunes. Head to the device information page and select the tab labeled “Info”. On this page, you’ll find a way of syncing your contacts with Google, so check the necessary boxes for “Sync Address Book Contacts” and “Sync Google Contacts”, configure your Google account information, and then re-sync the iPhone.

With the information in Google’s contact system, it will automatically be synchronised with your mobile handset when the same Google login is used on the phone.

Calendars are similarly fairly easy. You don’t need to sync them from iTunes and can instead do this directly on your iPhone before you make the jump to Android.

In the “Mail, Contacts, and Calendars” section of your iPhone’s settings menu, add your Google Mail account and sync the calendar to Gmail.

Sadly, synchronising and backing up SMS is actually not something that can be easily performed between iOS and Android. The easiest solution we’ve found is to selectively forward important messages to a phone or email address from the iPhone.

Apps you need

We’ve already gone through what apps will be provided for you, but there are also some apps you may want to buy on Android, providing some of the services an iPhone may have offered, and others that it didn’t.

DoubleTwist is a highly recommended free music player for every Android phone, serving up a well-designed app with support for wireless syncing with iTunes libraries for an extra $4.99 in AirSync. If you don’t feel like dragging over your music files piece by piece, simply install the desktop version of DoubleTwist to your Mac or PC and create a link between the computer and phone on WiFi.

It’s easy to do and reasonably quick, and it allows you to move music files to an Android device painlessly and without a cable connection.

SMS Backup+ is also one of the must haves, making it possible for your phone to automatically backup text messages to your Google Mail account.

Outside of HTC’s camera application, we haven’t seen many amazing camera apps. Even on the top-tier Galaxy S3, the camera application isn’t very special.

Enter Vignette, a $3.99 app that offers Instagram-like support for retro styles, vintage effects, and multiple framings. It’s evolved quite nicely over the years and supports most handsets, with highly customisable image presets and the ability to save the original images.

Vignette supports different camera settings, film-like colours, and neat borders.

Or you could just grab the totally free Instagram and keep using that, uploading retro-style photos shot on your uber-modern phone to social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Another genius app is for the drivers out there. This one, Bzzy, will automatically send out a message to anyone when you don’t want to be interrupted.

Say you’re driving and you don’t want anyone to contact you. Simply start the app, select the activity you’re doing – driving, in this instance – and any messages will be intervened by the app. At the end of your activity, press stop and the app will tell you how many messages you received.

Air Droid is also quite useful, effectively providing your computer with an easy way to communicate with your browser. Install the app to your Android, start the app, and make sure both your phone and computer are connected to the same WiFi network. If they are, you’ll find a web address to enter in the web browser of your desktop or laptop, allowing this part to see messages, documents, pictures, and other files on your phone.

And finally there’s Chrome, the browser of choice by Google. This one is a fairly new one, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see it replace the stock web browser in Google within the next year.

What Air Droid looks like from a computer, showing the contents of our Samsung Galaxy S3.