I’m often asked whether I loathe Apple products, since I’m a Windows-based support specialist with an Android phone and tablet. My answer is always the same – no, I quite like iPhones and iPads and had one myself (until that fateful trip to Salt Lake City when I left my iPad in the seat pocket of the plane, never to be seen again), but I prefer a measure of control over my smartphone/tablet/computing experience (“popping the hood” to tinker with all sorts of options) and I find the concept of Apple’s walled garden to be too restrictive.

That being said, I recognize that not everyone wants as much choice as I like, and for those who just want a phone or tablet that works pretty seamlessly, I’d say the iPhone or iPad work quite well. One caveat, however: if your collection of digital devices contains items outside the Apple universe (such as a Windows laptop or a Blackberry phone), getting your info and settings to sync becomes an exponentially trickier task.

I regularly steer my clients away from using iCloud as their central sync place, as problems can and do occur when you bring a Windows computer into the mix; iCloud doesn’t do a very good job of playing well with non-iOS devices. In many cases, I’ll suggest to iPhone/iPad users using a Google account as the cloud-based sync place (with the excellent $20 Outlook plugin called gSyncit to sync with Windows users’ most popular email/contacts/calendar app) as the features to help if something goes wrong are far more robust from Google.

Want to learn more? Head over to Lifehacker for this informative article on one user’s experiment switching back to Apple’s universe for a month. It’s well-written and can address things in layman’s terms for those who prefer as little tech speak as possible.