A week ago the::unwired already published an article about Microsoft MyPhone service that went live, prior to its scheduled date. Today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona during the Microsoft keynote with Steven Balmer and Andrew Lees, not only the Windows Mobile 6.5 is unveiled, but also two additional services: (1) Microsoft MyPhone, (2) Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

Some of you might saw the demo during the MWC-keynote, but -with many thanks to Scot Rockfeld from Microsoft for providing the screenshots of this service-  I will be able to focus more on some details, in the following walk-through. Microsofts strategy is aimed at providing the Windows-experience on (1) the personal computer, (2) on a mobile phone,  (3) in the cloud, and provide an exhange of information among the different “platforms”. The Microsoft MyPhone service connects these platforms, resulting in synchronizing, editting and sharing of personal information.

Currently MyPhone is offered as a free backup-service, which includes 200MB of storage. For using this service you need to install a client on your Windows Phone, and this also emphasizes that this is not an Exchange Active Sync solution for the mass market, although this might be a direction to go for the furture. However if you use a Microsoft Exchange solution now, you can use MyPhone as a complementary service because it backups your text messages, your photo’s, your video’s, your music and your documents. The Microsoft Exchange partnership has priority over the MyPhone service for managing your contacts, calender, tasks and e-mail just to be perfectly clear. For the documents backup and restore the following file-formats are supported:  ppt, xls, doc, one, wks, as well as txt, rtf, pdf, html and xml.

The screenshot above shows the option “connected devices”.  It is possible to connect multiple phones to this service, extremely helpful for technology enthusiasts lik we are. On the other hand the normal consumer probably just has one Windows Phone. Furthermore you can browse on your personal computer and upload a picture to the MyPhone account, and add it to a contact, restore it to a Microsoft Phone (one or more if you have connected more phones), or Archive it to the web. The last option just puts the file on your MyPhone account, while the icon clearly shows that the file isn’t on a device but in the cloudservice.

The MyPhone service is compatible with all Windows Mobile 6.0, 6.1 devices (professional and standard) up to the today announced version 6.5. Furthermore the MyPhone service seems to work both over a cellular data connection as well as over WiFi. The MyPhone business model is currently based on advertising, in order to provide the free storage. However for the future one could also think of premium subscriptions, which offer more storage space, or even operator “branded” services. For example: “My T-Mobile Phone” or “My Vodafone Phone”. 

The bottomline is that I’m really enthusiastic about the MyPhone service, because it can keep all my important information in the cloud. And for instance in comparison with DashWire it is a total Microsoft solution which builds upon the existing Windows platforms, Microsoft Exchange and cloud-services, resulting in a solid and robuust backup and restore solution. If you are as enthusiastic as I am, please read on over here for additional information.  

Reference List:

1. THE UNWIRED:  Microsoft previews Microsoft My Phone Consumer Cloud Service
2. MICROSOFT:  More info about the Microsoft MyPhone service
3. POCKETPCTHOUGHTS:  Microsoft’s My Phone Service
4. DASHWIRE:  Free mobile phone contact, photo, video and text message backup