Microsoft "My Phone" Service Announced Early

[Jason Dunn]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.windowsmobile.com/myphone' target='_blank'>http://www.windowsmobile.com/myphone</a><br /><br /></div><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/ppct/auto/1233967370.usr1.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>This is the service we've formerly heard referred to as <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">Skyline</span> Skybox. Scott Rockfeld, Director in the Windows Mobile group at Microsoft, gave this public statement today:</p><p><em>"Today, Microsoft's My Phone Web site went live prior to its scheduled debut. However, we are excited about the new Microsoft My Phone service, which will be available as a limited, invite-only beta. This is a significant milestone for Microsoft as it connects the phone to the PC and Web, making mobility a key pillar for the company's software+services strategy. </em></p><p><em>This new Microsoft cloud service syncs critical information (e.g., contacts, calendar appointments, tasks, text messages, photos, video, etc) on a user's mobile phone to a password protected Web site. Once synchronized, people can easily back-up and restore mobile phone data. My Phone provides an easy to use Web portal where people can access and manage content on the phone, and share that information with others. </em></p><p><em>My Phone helps people:</em></p><p><em>&bull; Keep their information backed up if they lose or break their phones.</em></p><p><em>&bull; Transition information if they switch to new phones.</em></p><p><em>&bull; Access the same information from their phone or PC."</em></p><p>This is shaping up to be a very interesting service in a number of ways - first, at launch it's going to be free. Second, if you've already got a phone synching with an Exchange server, your calendar/contacts/tasks. <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">This is, essentially, Exchange ActiveSync for the rest of the world who's not using Exchange. We'll see how it plays out - especially how locked-in it is to Windows Live services.</span> Will it play nice if you're using other services? Even if it doesn't, this could be THE killer reason for some people to switch to Windows Live services instead of competing services from Google, Yahoo, etc. Check out the <a href="http://www.windowsmobile.com/myphone" target="_blank">My Phone site</a> for more details.</p><p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> My understanding of My Phone <a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/news/show/92574/microsoft-s-my-phone-service.html" target="_blank">has been clarified</a> - it's not "Exchange for the rest of us" like I first thought; at least, not yet.</p>

[CESkins]

...This is, essentially, Exchange ActiveSync for the rest of the world who's not using Exchange.
Jason from what I read, this does behave like a cloud based ActiveSync which is where MS may be headed. I don't see it replacing Exchange unless it has data push features. Looks like you have to manually invoke the sync or set up a scheduled sync. I don't know how often the service can be set to sync. The one key feature it offers that Exchange doesn't now is syncing of the My Documents folder (meaning my notes and files can be synced/backed up). I wish Exchange offered this. Between MS My Phone and Exchange perhaps I can finally ditch ActiveSync when it comes to synching PIM data.

[Dyvim]

This looks really great. You may no longer even need desktop ActiveSync\Windows Mobile Device Center!
I love the idea of a cloud backup of all my phone information. iTunes does an excellent job of backing up my iPhone (it remembers every single piece of state information like browser and YouTube viewing history) but it still ties you to a desktop and any data you've collected since your last sync can be lost.

I wonder if they plan to take this to the next step and link in your PC to the cloud. i.e. sync my Outlook and My Document folder from my PC(s) to the cloud and to my phone. Having the same set of data and files all in sync on all my PCs and all my mobile devices would be killer. MobileMe does a pretty good job (after a rocky start) on doing this for my contacts, calendar, and bookmarks but leaves out the files (I don't count iDisk- I just want my documents synced automatically without me having to copy anything anywhere).

[Rob Alexander]

With the recent purchase of my Fujitsu UMPC (so that I now have three PCs and my WM phone to keep in sync), I finally went ahead and bought a personal Exchange account and it's been fantastic. I'm kicking myself that I didn't do it earlier.

This will do the same thing in its own way, but the instant updating that happens with Exchange won't be part of this. According to the site, it will default to syncing once a day. That would never do for me where I need to enter an appointment on my laptop, then walk away and know that my phone is instantly up-to-date.

What this will do for me, though, is sync those files without using the entirely horrible WMDC. If you'd have told me a year ago that I'd ever miss ActiveSync, I'd have said you were crazy... Well, I miss AntiveSync, but this could be even better.

So who knows someone with invitations?! :)

[j2inet]

This is bound to please those that took note (http://forums.thoughtsmedia.com/f322/how-microsoft-intends-regain-lost-ground-mobile-territory-92346.html)of not being able to connect to ActiveSync over IP.

This looks really great. You may no longer even need desktop ActiveSync\Windows Mobile Device Center!
You may still need it. Some Windows Mobile programs will only install from the desktop.


I wonder if they plan to take this to the next step and link in your PC to the cloud. i.e. sync my Outlook and My Document folder from my PC(s) to the cloud and to my phone. Having the same set of data and files all in sync on all my PCs and all my mobile devices would be killer.

You can kinda do that with Outlook and Mesh on the desktop right now. And for businesses that want similar functionality but want to be owners of their data there is Microsoft Office Groove (yeah, almost no one has heard of it despit it being available for 2 years now), though Groove doesn't sync to phones [yet].

[j2inet]

This will do the same thing in its own way, but the instant updating that happens with Exchange won't be part of this. According to the site, it will default to syncing once a day. That would never do for me where I need to enter an appointment on my laptop, then walk away and know that my phone is instantly up-to-date.

I thought the "Once a day" statement was speaking about the full backup, and it's a setting that can be changed. While it's not spelled out I feel it's unlikely that Microsoft would not implement push e-mail and appointments. Given that one can't use Exchange and this service on the same device I'm a bit inclined to think that the My Phone service is a packaging of Exchange service plus some other services and will have many of the same behaviours as exchange (with respect to mail and appointment syncing). But this is all speculation/expectation.

[Cattle-Dog]

I hope they don't abandon Mesh. I find that a lot more useful (but I am hitting Exchange for all my PIM stuff).

[Rocco Augusto]

I hope they don't abandon Mesh. I find that a lot more useful (but I am hitting Exchange for all my PIM stuff).

If I understand correctly from the information I have read on various sites, this and a lot of Microsoft's cloud based services that are coming out this year will be built on top of the Live Mesh and Azure platforms and soon Microsoft will let 3rd party developers create solutions built of Mesh as well.

[j2inet]

soon Microsoft will let 3rd party developers create solutions built of Mesh as well.
I think you can do that now. There's quite a few Mesh objects in the Live framework (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd158110.aspx).

[Rob Alexander]

I thought the "Once a day" statement was speaking about the full backup, and it's a setting that can be changed. While it's not spelled out I feel it's unlikely that Microsoft would not implement push e-mail and appointments. Given that one can't use Exchange and this service on the same device I'm a bit inclined to think that the My Phone service is a packaging of Exchange service plus some other services and will have many of the same behaviours as exchange (with respect to mail and appointment syncing). But this is all speculation/expectation.

Well, I hope you're right. I'm pretty sure that you'll be able to change the once a day thing, but even once a hour or whatever wouldn't give you that instant update that lets you walk immediately away from your desk and know that you can count on your phone being up to date. If they do put push technolgy into it, then it would be perfect, but nothing on their site actually suggests that.

[beq]

I've also been using Exchange PIM push. Cloud syncing the multimedia items, documents, and files (in addition to PIM) on the mobile device does sound nice.

Fully integrating with the Live Mesh service would be good to sync files on ANY device (mobile, computer, etc) with each other and the cloud.

Actually I'd tried out a few competing cloud storage+sync services (some of which also provide mobile clients or mobile-optimized web access). As I recall, SugarSync in particular has a good iPhone client for files and photos access. But otherwise I preferred solutions with Windows Explorer context-menu integration like Dropbox and Syncplicity.

http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?p=472854#post472854

P.S. I would love it if Jungle Disk adds support for syncing and mobile access, so I can continue using my own S3 account (with price scaling to unlimited storage/bandwidth)...

[Rob Alexander]

I spent the last month or so on Live Mesh and really liked the way the interface worked, but I finally had to give it up because I couldn't take the performance hit. It was especially bad on startup where it would grab pretty much the entire CPU to sync everything up even as I was trying to get the rest of the system going. Then, once I started tracking its CPU usage, I realized that it was using about half of my CPU cycles just sitting there when everything was in sync.

I was really sorry to give it up, though, because I love that it has a Windows Mobile client so I could include my HTC Touch in the mesh. Once they get the resource usage under control, I'll probably move back to it. In the meantime, I'm back with syncplicity, which works quite well and whose client is extremely well-behaved. It uses no measurable CPU cycles when it's not syncing and it gracefully gives way to foreground applications when it is syncing. My dream would be to have a Live Mesh/My Phone combination, with the low system impact of Syncplicity, that could keep everything synchronized between all my computers and my WM phone. That would be sweet!

[Jason Dunn]

I can't say anything specific, but my understand of My Phone has been...clarified today. Expect more on this later.

[j0dan]

Too bad Google beat them to it.
http://www.google.com/mobile/apple/sync.html

MS is dying.

[Dyvim]

Too bad Google beat them to it.
Too bad Google Contacts s**k so much- e.g. missing half of the fields from Outlook contacts, can't import data exported directly from Outlook without mangling most of the fields, etc. I really tried to like Google Contacts and Calendar and tried my best to move my Outlook PIM info into the cloud via Google (and not even using sync- just trying to import the darn things), but couldn't do it.

I expect MS's offering to be done better.