The Reason Behind iPhone's wifi sync with iTunes doesn’t work better?

When Apple announced it’s new iOS 5, I was excited to hear it would include wireless syncing for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

I’m a podcast addict, which means having to hook my iPod Touch up to my computer at least once a week to make sure I’ve got up-to-date episodes of all my favourites. The idea of being able to get new episodes wirelessly sounded like a dream.

Unfortunately, while iOS 5 does include wireless syncing with iTunes, it really, really sucks.

The first, and biggest, problem with wireless syncing is that it only works if your computer is turned on and iTunes is loaded up. In other words, you have to basically do all the steps you did before to start syncing except for the very last one: plugging in the cable.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why this is the case.Along with its new iOS, Apple has made a big deal this fall about its new iCloudservice, which allows iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users to sync their photos, backup their devices and update software through the cloud instead of having to plug into their computers.

Given that, it seems to me that my iPod Touch should be able to sync up with iCloud anywhere there’s an Internet connection, whether my computer is on or not.

At the very least, I don’t see why I can’t have an option on my iPod that allows me to download all new podcast episodes at once.

I can download single podcasts individually from iTunes but, since I listen to more than a dozen of them, this quickly gets tedious.

Perhaps Apple is concerned about mass podcast downloads overwhelming cell carrier networks. But they could easily limit the option to WiFi hotspots only, as they did when they launched Facetime.

The second big problem with iPhone wifi syncing is that it’s painfully slow. I’d say easily a quarter the speed of when I sync with my cable. This probably isn’t Apple’s fault. It’s presumably a technological limitation. And if wifi syncing was more convenient in other ways — like allowing you to sync from any WiFi hotspot — this wouldn’t be such a big problem.

But since I have to plug in my iPod to a power source, turn on my computer and load up iTunes to get WiFi sync to work, I may as well at that point just grab my cable and get the whole thing over with more quickly.

My final beef with WiFi syncing is that it seems to do screwy things to my computer. Once I enabled WiFi syncing, iTunes would keep on launching automatically while I was doing something else on my computer. I can only guess it somehow sensed my iPod was in the room and thought it should try to sync with it.

iTunes also ground to a near halt after I enabled WiFi syncing, making it difficult for me to do other things in the program like search the iTunes Store. I assume the effort of searching for available devices must take up a lot of memory.

After a couple weeks of frustration, I finally disabled WiFi syncing on my iPod and have gone back to the old cable. iTunes now runs a lot better and my syncs take a fraction of the time. I may give WiFi sync another try in the future if Apple improves the experience. But right now I’d say this new feature is a dud.

On the bright side, I absolutely love another feature of iOS 5: notification centre. I never used to bother with notifications before because I didn’t like how they popped up and interrupted what I was doing. Now I’ve got notifications enabled for email, Twitter and other key apps and — with a glance at my iPod Touch, without even loading up any apps — I can see if I have any new messages.

What about you? Have you tried WiFi syncing with your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch? Post a comment and let me know how it worked for you.