My Phone Syncing Service In Free Beta For Windows Mobile
My Phone, Microsoft’s over-the-air backup and synchronisation service for Windows Mobile devices, has opened up to anyone running Windows Mobile 6 or higher, offering 200MB of free cloud storage space.
As Jason at Gizmodo explained, My Phone isn’t by any means a push-style backup service. It can run only once a day when set to automatic, or manually synchronised when you remember to do so. Then again, the types of things it’s synchronising—contacts, appointments, phone camera pictures, tasks and whatever you’ve got in My Documents/Pictures/Music—aren’t the types of things for which you’ll always need up-to-the-minute versions.
You can get to your synced phone data through a password-protected web site, and you can synchronise more than one WinMo device to your My Phone account, which could help for those with multiple devices who sometimes don’t have access to them all. But that’s just about it, at least at this point. Still, 200MB of free online syncing isn’t a bad security blanket for your phone.
My Phone is free to use (while in beta), requires a sign-up and Windows Mobile 6 or later. My Phone [via Gizmodo]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
That's great, but didn't Google introduce this (minus the docs) for Win Mo some time ago.. when I was rocking WinMo I used Google and/or Funambol to keep everything sync'd
Sadly, online backup of a 16 GB microSDHC card is still... difficult.
meehawl
@guycross:
anyone else used funambol here? I used it for some time, but I have recently changed to a crack/blackberry so now just use GoogleSync - I dont really have files to sync from my phone... and if I want any picutres online I use the facebook app... or even twitpic/twitterberry
@Rieddhi Shah: Just kidding, you do get to pick what to sync, and contacts, calendar, and tasks MUST sync, while texts, photos, videos, music, and documents and optional.
Rieddhi Shah
@hepatace: That's what I was wondering. This may take up less battery than Dashwire, because it only syncs once a day, as opposed constantly, like Dashwire.
My Phone syncs everything, though, including music, and there doesn't seem to be an option to pick what to sync and what not to.
Rieddhi Shah
I have been using it for a month now and it has already proved its worth. I had to hard reset my HTC touch after I mucked around trying install a custom Manila 2D theme and it screwed up my existing configuration. After the hard reset, I just reloaded Myphone from the card and logged in. It took around 18-19 mins over WIFI to get me back all my contacts, calendar, photos. Just make sure you turn off the auto off battery saving feature on the phone before a restore.
For a feature so useful like this, I cannot complain
Microsoft should even give a feature like this for their desktop OSes...
Lot of people think that this is a synchronization services. Well, its not. It's just a backup service for free.
shallnot
Does anybody know off-hand how this compares to Dashwire? I'll probably check it out for myself later to compare the two.
hepatace
@typoink: My Phone doesn't use an Exchange account. It is it's own service. I have a feeling that it uses Exhange-esque protocols in the background, but it doesn't use up an Exchange slot on your WM phone :)
GldRush98
Sucks you have to forgo your current ActiveSync connection to use this. I just don't think I could give up GoogleSync for this...
Trey Carlee
Well... wish I could edit that... in options there is an area to sync storage cards. Nice
GldRush98
@guycross: Google's Sync Service (which I use) only allows calendar and contact sync. MyPhone also allows tasks and file storage, which makes it better as a backup tool.
Google's solution is 2-way push, though, which I find dramatically more useful. And, unfortunately, I don't believe one can use both at once, since I believe they both use WM's Exchange support.
Oh, nice! I've been using Sprite Backup to manually run backups about once a week... but it'll be nice to have something that does it automatically in the background.
Running my first sync now, hope it works well.
One thing I have noticed already though is it looks like it syncs data ONLY on the device, not data from your My Documents on your Storage Card. This might be a good thing since I have several gigs of music on there... but it'd still be nice to be able to sync the photo portion from the Storage Card.
Maybe they'll change that in a future version.
GldRush98
I'd thought the name was MyPhone, which would have left a lot less room for confusion.
burnblue
@guycross: Not quite. Google did introduce a little of it, like contact sync (if you let Google contacts overwrite the ones on your device). It wasn't really a phone backup solution
burnblue
MyPhone will not work if you are already synching your contacts to Live; that is, MS currently offer several similar services but they're not integrating, at least not yet...
Live might be the better option for many of us, since it is also synching Outlook 2007 contacts from the pc, via the little plugin Outlook Connector.
Restoring contacts with Live is quickly done. But if you're using WM6.1 pro and have lost all your contacts on the device, make sure you create at least one temporary contact on the device before you sign in to live and begin the synch - or the synch will be reverted and all your contacts on Live will be deleted as well!
Yes, it happened a few days ago. Luckily I had a csv backup as well that wasn't too outdated and with this tip which I got from a MS forum I was rescued.
Live can import csv files with contacts, which WM6.1 can not, so Live proved to be a good middleman.
And unlike Dashwire, it doesn't create multiple copies of each contact.
That said, I've just wiped the contacts from my device, signed out from Live and created a new MyPhone user profile just because I want to test it out!
cosmo
This works great. I really love it. However, the article above doesn't to be so positive about it. I can't agree. Everything is very customizable.
Firasco
I've been using this service for a couple months now and it has saved me from having a stroke multiple times. I've used this to restore my phone and as a storage space for program install files i just don't want cluttering up my storage card. Works great. No problems here. Active Sync still works fine for me.
t3chn1k4l