Win a Registration Key to Microsoft's My Phone Beta!

[Rocco Augusto]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://myphone.microsoft.com/' target='_blank'>http://myphone.microsoft.com/</a><br /><br /></div><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//zt/auto/1239217727.usr8.png" style="border: 0;" /></p><p>Good news everyone! Yours truly has come into possession of two registration keys for Microsoft's My Phone Beta program! Since I'm such a nice guy I thought the best thing to do would be to give them away to our readers! For those of you that are unaware - "Microsoft My Phone syncs information between your mobile phone and the web..." - Basically it can best be described as a very simple and easy to use cloud syncing solution for Windows Mobile handsets. Exchange services for the rest of us!To qualify to win one of these two never before used registration codes, all you have to do is post a reply telling us about a time when data syncing has failed you miserably. It can be anything; like having your phone stolen and not backing up your contacts or getting the phone number of an attractive member of the opposite sex seconds before your waiter spills a cup of water on your Samsung Blackjack... Whatever you can think of!The contest will be going on now until Sunday April 12th, 2009 at 11:59PM PST, at which time I will go through and randomly select two entrants to be announced Monday April 13th, 2009. As I mentioned before the winners will be selected randomly so unfortunately bribing me with cookies will do you no good - but you are more than welcomed to try!</p>

[hotdram]

My syncing fails me everytime I try to sync my phone :(
AS4.5 on XP with 2 PC's and WM6.1 is still not painless :(
Worst case happened to me though when my phone fell off my nightstand into the glass of water on the floor next to my bed. Couldn't have been a more perfect shot into such a small target. Wish I would have had everything backed up then :(

Cookies on the way,
~Rob

[Craig Horlacher]

I can remember syncing either my Nino 325 or my Cassiopeia E125 to my laptop at the time, a Toshiba Satelite, via the ir port. I actually did this often and it worked well. The thing that was a pain was for some reason I was in a car trying to get it to sync. I don't remember what vehical it was, where we were, or who was driving but I just remember it was bumpy and I couldn't keep the ir ports alligned correctly. The connect/dissconnect sounds, on the laptop and the PPC, were driving me nuts. I think I was trying to establish a connection to transfer a file and I think it eventually did work but I just remember it was a pain.

[signothefish]

It failed me miserably when the connector on the bottom of my phone broke, and I didn't have bluetooth capability on my PC. It would charge, but Activesync would not work.

[DocSc00teR]

True story. I spent over 40 minutes on the phone with a technician regarding data that wasn't syncing... only to discover that I had knocked the sync cable loose in the back of the PC. *sigh*

[V-iPAQ]

ya know, if your WM is one language and your PC activesync is another, you lose locale specific fields when u sync!

[sweb3028]

During a routine wipe (completed every few months), I somehow selected the option for the PPC to overwrite the PC. It wiped out all of the contacts on the PC.

[nosmohtac]

I used to use Activesync to sync all of my contacts, but I started flashing with custom ROMs and when I'd sync back up it would always make duplicate appointments and contacts. It was extremely frustrating.

I since have started to use pim backup, but after I flash with a new ROM, I often forget to set the backup schedule and then miss out on new numbers that I've entered since my last flash.

[code-frog]

When I forgot to sync before wiping my phone. A sync is brilliant when you remember to do it. So is that sync's fault (did it fail me) or is that my fault (did I fail myself)? Who cares just give me the darned key.;)

[rookcnu]

My worst syncing story?

Well,... anytime I try to sync. Gotta love Activesync. Never fails to give me problems.

Please tell me My Phone will be better at,... syncing.

[MR_E]

I can think of several occasions where, after installing a new OS on my PC (I do that a lot) and having entered a few important appointments and contacts in Outlook, I chose the wrong option at the first sync and let the PC overwrite the Nino/iPaq/Dash or what device I was using at the moment.
My fault, of course - not Activesync's...

[gogetbo]

Syncing has always seemed to mystify me. Of all the options I've chosen they all just go to hell. I really seem to need it pretty frequently too. The biggest issue is that I use a HTC Vogue when I'm in the office but it's ill advised to use such a small touch phone when I'm out on a construction site or surveying. I really would like to have a better solution to all of this. Outlook and ActiveSync drive me insane.

[dcassone]

I seem to always be tweaking AS to get it to work consistently. Also, there are times when my phone is out of sync while I am away from my PC and can't get a number or the address of an appointment because it is still in Outlook at the office.

[dessobs]

never use Activesync again.. since it fail me to sync my data.. it double and move some data... i hope this my phone wont fail me again...

[dessobs]

Never use activesync again since it fail me to sync my data.. i dont know why.. its always move my appointment and double my contact... i hope this my phone will never fail me again...

[smcnair2000]

I was attempting to do a sync with my laptop and my computer crashed requiring service by an "authorized" technician, since it was still under warranty. And wouldn't you know it, I guess the computer crash caused my windows mobile OS to malfunction or something, because, I lost all of my data (contacts, appointments, text messages, etc.). This was a nightmare because, I had just switched to the new phone, and gave my old phone to the shelter for battered women (they refurbish the phones and give them to the women so that they can have a phone to make emergency phone calls if they are in danger). I had no back-up of my info. Having access to Myphone will certainly help prevent this from ever happening to me again.

[jkovacs]

I sync with a home PC and a work PC and when I went from my Cingular 3125 to my Blackjack II I synced the Blackjack at home first and when I synced at the office I ended up turning all of my repeating meetings into static one time meetings each week. It was an incredible mess to cleanup.

...Joe K.

[Rocco Augusto]

I sync with a home PC and a work PC and when I went from my Cingular 3125 to my Blackjack II I synced the Blackjack at home first and when I synced at the office I ended up turning all of my repeating meetings into static one time meetings each week. It was an incredible mess to cleanup.

...Joe K.

Ouch! That happened to me on more than one occasion. Another reason why I enjoy syncing directly to the cloud :)

[leslietroyer]

sync fails me all the time because I like to sync at both work and home, I want to keep both work & home contacts & schedules on the phone. But I don't want to my work data on my home PC or home data on my work PC. I don't want to set specific flags or groups on my contacts at home or work -- this should be out of the box behaviour -- or maybe the redmondites only have a work live...

LEs

[gschlau]

AS4.5 should have been killed ages ago. Still causing me daily headaches!

[laubin]

I too have problems syncing my HTC Touch Pro from Verizon. Some times I have to play around with Windows & sync for endless minutes before it will "mostly" connect with my phone.

The My Phone service sounds like a dream come true for us.

We can have access to our info no matter where we are!

laubin

[jvanliew]

I don't know if this directly related to syncing

When I loaded the DST patch, all of my contacts gone, all of my tasks gone, all of my custom ring tones gone, all of my voice dial gone.

Then I try to sync, it won't even put my contacts and tasks back.

I had to delete the pairing and reconect, resetup a new pairing, and finally able to sysnc.

[Foo Fighter]

The worst data sync issue I encountered was a close brush with death with Plaxo. I had a pre-existing account setup and was in the process of building a new PC. After re-installing Office 2003, I downloaded Plaxo for Windows - setup the desktop client, and ran the installer but failing to tell it to supercede desktop data with the cloud. Instead of importing all my contacts, calendar, etc., it saw that my local copy of Outlook contained no data and subsequently obliterated my cloud data. In the end I was left with NOTHING. A blank copy of Outlook, and an empty Plaxo account.

Fortunately I had the forethought to backup my local pst file prior to this ordeal. But once again fate was against me. You would think that a simple pst import would solve the matter, but oh no. Not for me. No, I had to have the one single blessed pst file on God's green earth that had somehow become corrupted. So hopeless was my situation that even JASON here offered to help restore my Outlook database. In end all I managed to salvage was my address book, thanks to a rudimentary Yahoo backup.

Needless to say I no longer place my valuable data in Outlook's hands. The cloud is where my bits and bites are stored.

[je44]

there are to many products doing almost the same thing. I got the my phone beta setup the other day and why they have 3/4 sliightly diffrent technologies is very frustrating. There is Sky drive.... then there is live mesh (pretty cool with a phone client commin) and shared folders in Messenger and now my phone and I am probably missing 1 or 2. Seriously they have corprate ADD.

[habu28]

One month ago, I broke my leg badly. Once in a cast and on crutches, I finally left the hospital. I had just gotten a new ATT HTC Fuze. To add to an already painful day, crutches threw my routine into the trash-PDA with it. While I normally set my pack on the car roof when setting items up for the long drive to work. IE- my travel mug, GPS and other goodies into my Volvo. This day, however, I left the pack on my back and put my new Fuze-alone-on the roof. Suffice to say, my balance was shot, I felt crummy and was not at the top of my game.
You can see where this is headed: About five minutes into my drive, I realized that my Fuze was missing. After driving back to the hospital, I found it smashed to bits only 25 meters away from my parking place. As per the norm, ATT could not have cared less and saw it only as an opportunity to make more money. A pain to say in far more ways than one..<o>></o>
BR
Wash, DC<o>></o>>

[TotalIdiot]

Well, coincidently, right now I'm in a Sync pickle. For the past 14 months I have been ASing my out-the-box vanilla HTC Touch Cruise WM6.0, accumulating contacts and messages etc without major problems. (Sure AS regularly forgets my user settings, but I thought that was part of the program ;)) Like a lamb before the slaughter, AS has been fattening me up. Now, all of a sudden for no apparent reason, my PC (XP SP3) won't recognise my device anymore :(

I've Googled, I've tried everything (switched ports, cables, rebooted, re-installed AS), prayed to the big MS cloud in the sky, but nothing except the dreaded bubble of gloom: 'USB Device not recognised- one of the USB devices attached to this computer have malfunctioned'. I'm starting to have nightmares about hard-reseting my device and 'upgrading' to WM6.1 via my SDHC card. Its like being on death row!

Yours, syncless and clueless

TotalIdiot

[Megaperfect]

When I try to sync up my Moto Q and my HP iPAQ in the same day. There is a constant problem with Microsoft's Active Sync:(. It can be, one of two things, it can't find the com port or Active Sync just crashes when I hook up the second device. Numerous reports have been generated and sent to Microsoft without any solutions. Its only when I use one or the other device, once a day, does Microsoft's Active Sync work for me.

[lsbeller]

Never really lost data but sure do get plagued by duplicate contacts and other outlook items.

Steve

[SciFrigGuy]

I have two Win Mobile Phones that I sync regularly, but quite a few times one of them will get mutiple errors and i have to do a soft reset on the phone and sometimes a reboot of the X61 laptop. This one time I needed a customer's contact info while using my laptop and it was just put into my work phone. So I sinked it and my personal phone, then the info disappeared! Fantastic, now I have to track down the customer through another customer to get it again. Kinda makes me look a little like an idiot you know. One time, syncing over Bluetooth, my personal phone was wiped and reset to original out of the box condition. That took a couple of hours to reset up. Fun times.

Steve.

[fran403]

I'd love a key...

Worst case of not syncing occurred when I was installing a pos freeware application that would allow me to copy my contacts to my PC's hard drive (since I don't use Outlook) - well over 500 contacts that were hand copied from a Palm device. You guessed it...the software froze the phone and I had to do a hard reset...and lost it all!

So please may I?

Thanks

[ramurphyjr]

After purchasing my Sprint Treo Pro, the Sprint salesman transferred my contacts to my new phone. Great idea. When I went to sync for the 1st time with my pc, I was prompted for a name for my phone. No big deal. After having to do a hard reset, the 1st time I synced with my pc, I saw software start as if the phone had never been connected. Duplicate contacts, dulicate calendar items, etc. What fun!

[mightymission]

Ok here's my horror story:

Bought my new Wing and had to load all the apps onto it and when I went to sync my contacts I got that dreaded error msg on activesync that my contacts weren't there. To make a long story short, by the time I got the contacts to sync they had duplicated on both my desktop Outlook and on the phone.
Four hours after starting this task I finally had everything how I wanted.

[hogger_jeff]

How's this for a horror story: went on a business trip and made lots of new contacts. I entered all the info into my Advantage with no problems. When I got home, I was to go straight on vacation with the family, so, I moved my sim card to my smaller phone (lot easier to carry when I'm not at work). To make a long, sad story short, I forgot to sync, forgot to charge the battery and the device ran out of juice while I was away. I came home to a fully reset phone with none of my hard-earned contact info on it...! FWIW, I have two batteries for my Advantage and I unfortunately had the bad one in at the time. D'OH!

[jimbaran]

It'll be great if I can use microsoft's myphone service to sync my contact, calendar, etc without using usb cable to sync my data. My failed sync happened when my phone suddenly won't power on and I found out that I lost all of my contacts after I have it serviced. I finally realized that I got more than triple entries on my computer contacts and calendar so I had to delete the entries one by one.

It was taking so much of my time by doing so. I am hoping that by having Microsoft myphone service, I have peace of mind with my data without worrying about double entries, etc.

Please choose me.

Thank you.

[fone_fanatic]

The worst i've had happen is either duplicate contacts or having the device clear my outlook contacts.

I'm currently using Mail2Webs free exchange account, but just last week i recieved an email from them stating that they are no longer gonna offer the free exchange account :( so this would be perfect timing :D

[mmidgley]

I had quite the miserable experience when I used ActiveSync to sync my financial data via Microsoft Money. It worked for quite a while and then... Long story less long is that it corrupted my money data file but didn't know that for months. It took Microsoft over a year to figure this out via constant support emails! Now I don't sync financial data, I use a non-microsoft ppc app standalone (even though it could sync fine now).

m.

[Ghostman]

This is more a story of "when data syncing could have saved me". I bought a Blackjack, took the time to transfer all of my data from a non smart phone into Outlook on my laptop (255 contacts along with addresses, birthdays...yea, this was my brain) and syc with my new phone. I played with the Blackjack for a while and had an idea that S60 would be fun. I bought a Nokia and loaded their software. It was ok, but I did not like the other software and changes it made to my pc. In the meantime, I had done a hard reset on the Blackjack. (did I mention it was my brain?) So after a few weeks, I decided to go back to WM where I could tinker and did a full restore on my pc to get the Nokiaware off of it. Uh-oh...wiped out my Outlook...nope, did not sync the Blackjack first. Did not want to re-install the nokiaware and sync it, so I manually had to type in all 255 (plus by this time) again. Syncing over the air to a backup location would be a blessing and save me from myself.

[Richard76]

Using ActiveSync since my first Pocket PC, a Uniden PC A100 in the early '90's, I have had many "horror stories" over the years. Most of these include data loss of some kind.

However, the most memorable was on my Philips Nino 500 where for whatever reason, I lost and could not resetablish a partnership with ActiveSync. As it was my only mobile database for business, I ended up entering all of the contacts into the device itself using the tiny, onscreen keyboard and stylus. Over 700 of them.

But that wasn't the worst part. On a subsequent business trip I proceeded to leave my Pocket PC in the armrest of a rental car at the Calgary airport...duh! By the time I got back to Toronto and called the car rental company, it was missing in action, never to be seen again.

And to add insult to injury, I purchased another Nino immediately, had the same sync issues with ActiveSync and ended up entering all my contacts by hand...again!

[Rocco Augusto]

Thank you everyone! The contest is now over and the winners were announced here:

http://forums.thoughtsmedia.com/showthread.php?t=93344

Best,
Rocco

[maxnix]

Thank you everyone! The contest is now over and the winners were announced here:

http://forums.thoughtsmedia.com/showthread.php?t=93344

Best,
Rocco
How can that be?

Just received announcement today!

[Rocco Augusto]

How can that be?

Just received announcement today!

Sorry! It was a short contest that only lasted the length of the weekend! We do have another contest coming up in a little under 2 weeks for a brand new phone. Keep your eye out for that one!