Smack!Down 2009 App Demo #1 - Microsoft MyPhone

At this year's Top Gear inspired Smack!Down we demonstrated a number of applications that make the Windows Mobile Platform a compelling technology enabler.

The first of these is the relatively new, and more importantly, free service from Microsoft: MyPhone.

MyPhone provides an automatic backup of your entire Windows Phone, including photos, videos, and SMS Text messages. You can set it to sync automatically (I always set mine to sync at about 2am) or perform a manual sync if necessary.

There are a couple of cool applications of MyPhone, besides the rapid and complete restoral of your phone. 1st you can access whatever information you've backed up from the web. Yep, someone sms'd their phone number to you, and you left your phone at home? No problem, just login to MyPhone and search your backed up texts. Awesome! Of course the same goes for that photo you took of the whiteboard in the last workshop, or that quick video interview you grabbed at last weeks conference.

2nd is changing phones: Fire up your new Windows Phone, connect to Exchange and your PIM (email, calendar, contacts, tasks) is sorted; install MyPhone, restore, and all your data, including things that were on a removable card, are now restored on your new phone. Voilà.

To install just head over to http://myphone.Microsoft.com/install download the cab file and execute directly on your phone. You will need a Windows LiveID to access the service from your phone and the Internet.

You will, of course need a phone with Internet connectivity, and I'd recommend at least 3G.

The only challenge I experienced with the service was the limited storage space. 200MB seems like a lot for a phone, but it turns out that the service keeps a separate instance of every device you've connected. This means that when you connect a new phone there is automatically a duplicate copy of all the photos, videos, etc on the web (after the inital restore and first backup). With a couple of videos, it doesn't take long to fill up 200MB.

You can manage this online of course, but I personally found it really challenging to click through reams of links to delete the appropriate info.

This, by the way, is why my demo failed in the Smack!Down :-)

Still, if you have a Windows Phone, this is an application & service you can't afford to ignore. I personally find it far superior to MobileMe, or the iTunes constrained philosophy for the iPhone.