Microsoft opens 'My Phone' cloud service for Windows Mobile

Mobile World Congress, Barcelona | It’s not Mobile Me, but it’s a good start. That’s the general mood surrounding today’s launch of My Phone, Microsoft’s new cloud-based service for Windows Mobile phones.

Part of the Windows Live portfolio, the service is designed to help users sync, save and store content from their Windows Mobile 6.x smartphone onto a Microsoft-hosted server farm.



My Phone performs a daily backup of your phone’s address book, SMS messages, appointments, tasks, photos, videos, music and documents up to 200MB of content. The data store can be accessed online through your account at the myphone.microsoft.com portal, and also downloaded onto a new device should your mobile phone be lost, stolen or replaced by a shiny new smartphone.


As welcome as that sounds, there’s no argument that My Phone falls well short of Apple’s Mobile Me service. There’s no BlackBerry-style email synchronisation against desktop accounts for instance, or even synchronisation with other Windows Live services which can store your contacts and calendar in the same cloud. But Microsoft admits this is just a ‘first step’ for My Phone, and says there’s plenty more to come.

“Over time you'll see us increasingly integrate My Phone with other Windows Live services such as Windows Live photos, contacts, calendar and other types of services” says Todd Brix, Microsoft's Senior Director of Mobile Services. “We'll end up integrating more and more of these.”

Brix also told APC that My Phone would be woven into Windows 7, most likely as one of the options on the Device Stage when a Windows Mobile phone is connected to the PC. “It's part of our strategy to integrate Windows Live services with Windows 7, and My Phone is one of those services.”

Brix says that a future evolutions of the service would extend to personalising the phone using the Web front-end – changing the wallpaper and ring tones, adding applications and setting a variety of options all from a familiar and easy to use Web page rather than fiddling with the phone’s own menus.


The My Phone client will be built into all phones running the next-gen Windows Mobile 6.5 OS, but is already available as a downloadable client for 6.0 and 6.1 devices – provided you were one of the lucky ones to score an invite.

“We’ll make this an open public beta after a couple of months” Brix told APC. “Right now we're taking requests for wait lists, so we can send them an email in a couple of months when we the space opens up.”

Each backup session takes place at a user-designated time between 11pm and 5am, provided of course that your phone is turned on. Microsoft has chosen this time not just because it’s when the phone is least likely to be in use, but because there are fewer users on the network and thus overall speeds should be higher, enabling a faster backup and minimising network load. You can also initiate a manual sync session at any time.

There are a few caveats, however. Microsoft says that because My Phone is intended as a personal rather than a business service, it doesn’t support Exchange – so it won’t synchronise contacts, calendar appointments, or tasks which are mirrored to your company’s Exchange server.

Contacts have to be stored in the phone’s memory rather than on the SIM card in order to be backed up. And while you can include the contents of a memory card in the backup session, My Phone’s 200MB ceiling will be insufficient for all but the smallest memory cards with very little music or video.

David Flynn is attending Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as a guest of Microsoft