I grabbed an LG Optimus V Android phone on Virgin Mobile's prepay plan, and it's pretty impressive. It's only $25 a month for unlimited data and 300 minutes. I'd been Tracfoning for a couple of years, keeping an iPod touch in my pocket for sort of a poor man's smartphone. I didn't think I'd appreciate 3G internet so much, but I am.

One of the best parts of Android is the ability to use mini-SDHC cards rather than paying Apple's $70 for going from 8 to 32 or $100 for 16 to 32. The downside is that the tether-paradigm Apple's got, where you basically manage your phone inside and out in iTunes.

With iTunes, when I lost my first iPod touch and got another, I lost nothing. All the apps, music, podcasts were all on iTunes, and sync'd right back over without a hitch.

With Android, swapping cards can be a real pain. If you've got apps on the card, you can't, apparently, just copy data over and onto the new card. Somehow, the apps forget they're apps on the way over. Instead, you have to move apps from SDHC to the phone's internal storage -- and on the Optimus V, that's paltry -- and then to the new SDHC. That's not fun. One swap to figure it out. One swap to move apps from SDHC-old to phone to SDHC-new, and then a second rigamarole to get the rest. It's not smooth.

I guess the lesson is that you should buy an SDHC card, the largest your phone will hold, with the phone. Don't use the one that comes with it (mine had 2 gigs). Save yourself a little trouble.

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