Synchronize your contacts, appointments, etc., Part II - Microsoft's My Phone

This is Part II of synchronizing your data...you can find Part I on Google Sync here. In this part I'm talking about Microsoft's new My Phone service which is in beta. On their Windows Mobile blog they posted a code to get into the beta. I'm not sure how long it will be valid, but try this if you can't get in: 987M-HDQM-5UI2-ZNEZ

Unfortunately My Phone doesn't play very nice when you have an Exchange sync setup. It detects there is an existing Activesync partnership, and it tells you it will not sync contacts, calendar, and tasks unless you either remove the partnership or disable Activesync. I like the immediacy of Google Sync since it pushes changes to my phone, so I had to use My Phone for other things like text messages, photos, and music. Hopefully they will realize people want to do multiple syncs and they will let you sync to both. But for now, I couldn't sync those things that overlapped.

It's kind of nice how My Phone has a single web interface to view all your phone's information once it has been uploaded, though it is quite basic right now. Also, since things like files are getting backed up, there is storage space associated with your account. Currently it's a mere 200MB, though in the forum they indicated this will be increasing progressively.

Besides the Exchange limitation, there's some other features of My Phone that need improvement. You can have it sync a storage card in your phone, but it either syncs it or it doesn't. There's no way to select specific folders or filetypes, so if you have a 2GB card and you have a lot of stuff on it, you can't pick and choose what gets backed up. There are checkboxes for filetypes like Pictures, Videos, etc. but I think those only apply to the phone. But it's possible it does apply to both phone and storage card, in which case there'd be a bit more control. Still it doesn't get nearly as granular as it probably should.

The app menus are similar to Activesync, which led some in the My Phone forums to wondering exactly what Microsoft is doing, since their mobile sync is all fragmented now. You can do all the file syncs I mentioned above with My Phone, you can sync to an Exchange server for email, tasks, calendar, and contacts using Activesync, and you can also do file sync using Live Mesh. So why three different apps? There should be 1 app that handles all of that. And even if they can't unify them, they shouldn't be stepping on each other, like use of Activesync crippliing the sync ability of My Phone as it does now.

Hopefully, given some time, they will work out some of these kinks. Until then, like I said for Google Sync, this is a good first step. It's also worth reiterating my summary from Part I: Microsoft's My Phone is capable of syncing a lot more information (text messages, photos, music) and presenting it in a single interface intended just for that data. But My Phone syncs on a schedule (and is normally expected to sync once a day), while Google Sync pushes changes immediately. So which one you choose depends on exactly what you're looking for.

In my case, I'm keeping both around because they each have their benefits and I'm interested to see how they both evolve. And I'll continue syncing regularly to my computer as well, because Google Sync and Microsoft My phone are both test versions of software and you never know when a mis-sync can mess everything up.