Apple has a history of offering seamless data syncing across multiple devices with its .Mac service, which was with MobileMe last summer. Although MobileMe keeps your information in perfect sync across desktops and Apple's mobile devices, the service isn’t perfect. The company has been mainly ironing out bugs and performance issues since the MobileMe launch last July. As a result, the company failed to deliver several promised features (MobileMe file sharing, for example) and has not expanded the service with new features. You could say that Microsoft is playing a catch up game with its upcoming My Phone service, but there will be more than meets the eye and it will give Apple's $99-a-year cloud suite a serious run for its money.


Based around technologies that Microsoft acquired when it purchased Portuguese developer MobiCorp last summer, My Phone (previously code-named SkyBox), takes MobileMe's contacts, email and calendar syncing to the next level with much broader content types that can be synced and backed up in the cloud. Expected to launch as a free beta in mid-February, My Phone will come in two flavors when version 1.5 is released this summer: Free and Premium, which will likely come with more features, enhanced online storage and no ads.

According to a teaser page at Windows Mobile Site, My Phone will work with Windows Mobile 6-compatible devices as an online hub that stores and syncs the content residing on your phone to a password-protected site in a Microsoft datacenter where it will be editable via a web interface. Unlike MobileMe, My Phone will let you sync other content beyond contacts and calendars. The default setting will back up phone contacts, text messages, calendar appointments, tasks and documents, in addition to music, photos and videos, but users will be able to cherry-pick content types they wish to include in their syncing schedule.

The service will make it easy to transfer information from an old phone to a new one, based on the image of the phone stored in the cloud. A basic, free service will come with 200 MB of secure, password-protected online storage to store content that resides on your phone – which may be a bit tight if you plan on syncing music, photos and videos. Microsoft said that users will receive an error message on their phones when they exceed the storage limit, adding that their accounts on the My Phone web site will only include information received prior to reaching the 200 MB limit. Any files in excess of this limit will not be saved.

In a nutshell, My Phone is Microsoft's answer to Apple's MobileMe that, among other things, keeps contacts, calendars and email synced between PC or Mac desktops, iPhones and an iPod touch. With My Phone, Microsoft is aiming to exploit weaknesses of Apple's Mobile. How do those two services compare?


Your mobile devices - in perfect sync

Once you perform an initial sync with My Phone, your phone will sync with the cloud once a day, between 11:00 pm and 5:00 am. You could also perform a manual sync by selecting the Sync option found in the Microsoft My Phone application on a phone. Restoring a cloud backup to a new phone requires installing the My Phone application on a new phone and performing the sync.

"If you used My Phone on your old mobile phone, download and install Microsoft My Phone on your new mobile phone and sign in to the Microsoft My Phone application on your phone using the same Windows Live ID that you previously used," Microsoft wrote. "Then, by synchronizing manually or waiting for the next automatic synchronization, all information that you backed up to your Microsoft My Phone web account will be restored to the new phone."

It should be noted that syncing occurs over the cellular network, meaning it counts against your monthly wireless data, something you should keep in mind if you're going to include photos, music and videos in your syncing plan. As of press time, we were unable to confirm whether My Phone will work over a Wi-Fi connection as well.


My Phone: Full phone backups and restores over-the-air

My Phone advances MobileMe with broader content that basically includes everything you keep on your phone. iPhone users do not have such a feature and have to sync with iTunes if they want to create  an iPhone backup or restore it to a new device later. Yes, iPhone users can also retrieve contacts, calendars and email that reside on Exchange and MobileMe servers over-the-air, simply by providing their service credentials on a new handset, but everything else has to go through iTunes. This includes mail settings, text messages, notes, call history, contact favorites, sound settings, widget settings, certain network settings, and other preferences including settings and data from third-party applications purchased from the App Store.

Music, movies, TV shows, photos, podcasts, audio books and applications on the iPhone are not included in iTunes backup since this content resides in the iTunes library. This means that, in order to transfer content from one iPhone to another, you first have to restore a new iPhone from a previously created backup file, authorize the handset with iTunes and perform a full sync - all on a computer. My Phone achieves all this over-the-air, but both approaches have advantages and pitfalls.

A cloud backup of entire phone is better insurance policy compared to iPhone backups that live in iTunes on your desktop. If your hard drive fails and you did not back it up to other physical media, you may be in trouble. With a cloud backup, you assume that Microsoft's datacenters will not lose your data. However, syncing hundreds of megabytes of music, videos and images with iTunes on a desktop, over a USB cable beats cloud syncing over a much slower 3G network and does not eat into your monthly wireless data allowance. Perhaps Apple disabled music and video syncing over-the-air on iPhones with a reason...


Read on the next page:  What My Phone lacks - and what it promises; Conclusion

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My Phone lacks personal email and push

Although My Phone and MobileMe sync contacts and calendars with the cloud, My Phone lacks Hotmail integration or any kind of email service for that matter. Both services can sync images taken on the phone with the cloud, where they can be emailed to others or saved to a computer via a web interface. However, MobileMe wasn't designed to sync the entire iPhone image library with the cloud. Although users can upload images one by one to the existing MobileMe gallery on the web, a two-way photo sync is not possible: If you add a photo to the MobileMe gallery on the web via the web interface, it will not be pushed to your iPhone image library over-the-air.

My Phone lacks push technology for real-time updates between the phone and the cloud. Instead, you either manually initiate a sync on a phone or wait for the pre-set nightly syncing schedule to kick in. MobileMe comes with push built-in and allows users to selectively activate this feature for email, calendars, contacts and bookmarks separately in order to save battery life, in addition to a manual sync setting and pre-set intervals of every 15 or 30 minutes, hourly, or daily.


My Phone conflicts with Exchange

My Phone won't let you sync your contacts and calendars with the Exchange server and the My Phone cloud at the same time. If you have Exchange syncing already set up, My Phone will not sync your contacts, calendars, or tasks. If you have Windows Live installed on your phone, it will synchronize your Windows Live contacts with the Windows Live web site, and My Phone will synchronize your other contacts with the My Phone web site. However, this means that those who have private and corporate contacts and calendars synced with Windows Live and Exchange will not be able to use My Phone to sync contacts created on the handset that don't belong to neither Exchange or Windows Live.

MobileMe allows iPhone users to sync their address book and calendars with both the Exchange server and the MobileMe cloud at the same time, with each item being synced with the service from which it originated, making it easy to have corporate and private contacts and calendars combined on the handset and synced accordingly. My Phone also won't sync contacts stored on the SIM card. To sync these contacts, you will need to copy them first to your phone's memory. Any content stored on a memory card will not be included in the default sync, as well as documents that reside outside the My Documents folder on your phone, although you can include these locations if you set up a custom syncing plan.


MobileMe woes and My Phone promise

We should acknowledge that it was .Mac that first brought seamless syncing across devices into the game, while MobileMe extended this to an over-the-air push calendar, contact and email for the iPhone and iPod touch. We should also point out that Apple has done a lousy job building upon the MobileMe foundation with new features. As a matter of fact, we're still waiting for the filesharing feature that was promised last year.

While Apple dipped its toes into online services, Microsoft has been quietly prepping the answer to MobileMe. With My Phone, the software maker appears to have successfully leveraged its broad online expertise, having assembled building blocks of various services into a tempting solution that answers a simple, but important question: How do I get my stuff from an old to a new phone?

Yes, My Phone will only work with Windows Mobile devices, but MobileMe also only works with the iPhone and iPod touch. While both services offer a similar seamless integration, My Phone can sync beyond calendars, contacts and email, although we seriously doubt many would sync their music and videos with the cloud, especially using a cellular network. For storing information on your phone that really matters to you, My Phone will be great.


Conclusion

In this regard, My Phone will be a convenient time saver for transferring content between phones and keeping a secure online copy of it. According to ZDnet, a future version of the platform will let you change ringtones, backgrounds and manage mobile applications, music and video all from the cloud, creating even an bigger feature gap to MobileMe. A basic My Phone version will remain free of charge thanks to ads. The Premium 1.5 version, expected this summer, should bring more features and online storage beyond the bare 200 MB minimum. Version 2.0 is rumored to integrate with Microsoft's upcoming App Store rival called Skymarket. This will enable My Phone to back up purchased applications and their data, something App Store and MobileMe cannot do today.

It is difficult comparing a free My Phone service with a paid service – like the $99-a-year MobileMe. The membership price for MobileMe includes 20 GB of secure online storage on Apple's servers, jaw-dropping image galleries, an email account on the me.com domain, push contacts, calendars and photos syncing with applications on Mac and PC - all features My Phone does not offer. With that in mind, however, we still cannot help but feel that even the free My Phone 1.0 is going to give MobileMe a serious run for its money, at least when it comes to backing up your entire phone or moving content between several phones.