James Bannan23 February 2009, 4:45 PM
Microsoft's recently-announced My Phone service offers cloud storage and synchronization services to Windows Mobile users. But what's it actually like to use?
As recently reported on APC, Microsoft has announced its My Phone service for Windows Mobile users – a service which lets them sync contacts, tasks, calendar items and other data like photos and music on its cloud servers. The service is still in beta and isn’t yet publically available, but Microsoft provided APC with an invitation code to try out the service. So how does it stack up?
The My Phone service is linked to a Microsoft Live ID (previously known as Passport), although at present the service doesn’t share information with any other Live services. Given that Microsoft is strongly pushing the connected and integrated nature of the Live platform, this is something we will hope to see as the product develops.
The sign-up process is quick and straightforward – like any other Live service – and the first task is to get the phone connected. You can do this by either browsing to the My Phone install page from the phone, or have Microsoft send a link straight to the phone to install the app via the telco’s data service.
Once installed, you launch My Phone from the Programs menu and sign in using the same Live ID credentials, then select which data you want to sync and the schedule. My Phone isn’t like Activesync or a Push service – it synchronises on either a daily or weekly schedule, or if you don’t have a capacious data service you can choose to only sync manually.
The sync time depends completely on your connection type and speed and how much data you’re syncing, but in our testing (and of course, bear in mind that the service is only being used by a small number of users at this stage) connectivity back to Microsoft's servers was surprisingly responsive. We tested it through WiFi as we didn't have a 3G Windows Mobile handset available to test with.
When you log back into the service via a browser on your PC, it lets you know how much space you’ve used and you can browse and search across all the data that’s been uploaded.
You can also add new data or upload media to the cloud service directly via the browser and have it sync back to the phone.
The ability to manage personal data such as tasks, calendar, contacts, SMSes and so on via a cloud service is nice but the usefulness of syncing multimedia files like music, video and photos is questionable. For one thing, My Phone only provides 200MB of sync storage, so you can never sync more files than that, and secondly, few people would want to be syncing music and video over a mobile data plan.
Additionally, Microsoft is currently trialling the beta service of its other cloud sync service, Live Mesh, for mobile devices including Windows Mobile, and this is designed to let users sync media straight from the phone to the Live Desktop as well as to any other connected Mesh systems.Live Mesh offers 5GB of cloud storage compared with My Phone’s 200MB, so (presuming you did want to sync those kinds of files wirelessly) at the moment Mesh is far and away the better option for online media services for mobile devices.
Microsoft has announced that My Phone is a
personal service which won’t support Exchange directly (presumably Microsoft wants to protect its comfortable Exchange Server revenues so businesses don't consider dropping Exchange for My Phone). However, it should still be
possible to use ActiveSync as an intermediary between MySync and Exchange,
which is nice if you like having multiple backups. If you have ActiveSync on your PC, you can sync data that My Phone has pushed out onto your handset back to Outlook, and then have it pushed back to Exchange from your PC.
You can also use the service to sync SMS text messages and store them online at My Phone as a backup. The online interface doesn’t support the threaded discussion messages which is available on current Windows Mobile devices so it’s a bit cluttered – hopefully that will be added in over time. This is a useful feature particularly if you need to reflash the phone or you’re a developer always trying new ROMs, as text messages are the one thing which can’t be natively backed up using ActiveSync.
The other nice thing about My Phone is that you can connect multiple phones to the service – it’s not tied to just one device at a time. So if you have multiple Windows Mobile phones or you have a few people who all have devices you can sync data between them using the same Live ID account. The only drawback between syncing personal data between phones is that there’s no way to distinguish private data – if it’s being synced then it’s available across all devices.
With all this personal data going up onto the cloud, it will become even more important for users to protect their Live IDs. Not that the general public should feel too sorry for socialites and celebrities when their accounts are hacked and their vacuous rantings published, but the principle still stands – protect your identity.
It will be interesting to see how My Phone develops. It’s still early days and we’ll see whether all the features of the service as it currently stands make it through to the final release. It’s certainly behaving reliably at the moment, and offers some nice-to-haves for users with personal Windows Mobile-based phones, but it might prove to be more attractive in future if Microsoft brings it into the Windows Live family of services – Live Phone, perhaps.
At least the price of My Phone is right -- $0. Microsoft does deserve some kudos for providing real value to users of Windows Mobile, while Apple charges iPhone users $129 per year for MobileMe, which provides very similar functionality. Of course, with Google offering Google Sync for iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia Symbian Series 60 phones and others, it's hard to see that any mobile phone vendor will be able to continue charging money for over-the-air sync back to a PC in the near future. Very soon, we'll all be expecting it as a standard part of a smartphone purchase.