One of the biggest announcements to come out of the recent MWC 2009 conference was Microsoft’s MyPhone online backup service.  This is a huge step for Microsoft, and it is a fantastic looking service.  Essentially, it takes all of the important data from your Windows Mobile phone, copies it to your online MyPhone account, and puts it in a format which allows you to access the data just as easily from the site as from your phone.  In other words, like the popular service, Dashwire, it is not just a backup service, but complete access to your data from any computer in the world.

When MyPhone was announced at MWC, Microsoft indicated that it would be an initially closed beta.  Still, I went ahead and registered my Live ID (the whole thing is tied to your Live ID account or Hotmail) and hoped for the best.  Needless to say, I was quite surprised last night when I received an invitation to register for MyPhone…which I did immediately before they could change their collective minds.  I have now spent most of the day (or at least what free time I have had) playing with this program.  Here are some of my initial thoughts.

The first thing you will need to do is download a pretty small file to your Windows Mobile device.  You can either download the cab file from your mobile web browser,or MyPhone can send you a text message containing the download link.  Either way, the file will be downloaded and installed on your device.

So, there is really not much to see on your actual device.  Just a blank screen with the results of your last sync.  Select Options under the Menu soft button to choose which data should be synced.  Each selection you make will sync only from your main memory.  If you want to sync both the main memory and storage card, then you must select the Sync storage cards option.  One thing I did not like here was that you could not choose to sync the storage card for only some options.  Sync storage card was either on or off.  As you will seem, this lack of sync customization is going to be a recurring theme in this one.

As far as which items to sync, you do have quite a few options here.  You can choose to sync:

• Contacts
• Calendar
• Tasks
• Text Messages
• Photos
• Videos
• Music
• Documents

From your phone, you can also sync your data or set an automatic sync schedule.  MyPhone can can be set to sync manually, daily or weekly.  I opted for a daily sync in the middle of the night when I have my phone on the charger.

OK, now that we are synced, let’s jump over to the web side of things and take a look at how this is all going to work.  There are five pages to this site: Home, Phone, Connected Phones, Settings, and Deleted Items.  Most of the substance takes place on the Phone page.  So, we’ll look at that in a minute.  Here is what you will see on the other four pages:

Home is your main entry point to the MyPhone page.  From here, you can monitor your available storage (you only get up to 2 GB for now) or jump directly to common tasks.

Connected Phones shows you the details about each of the phones connected to your MyPhone account.  One of the cool things here is that you can connect multiple phones to a single account.

Settings allows you to change your designated time zone.  No word for now whether more options will be added here in the future.

Deleted Items is essentially the myPhone recycle bin.  When you delete an item, it is not removed, it is just moved to this folder, where it will still count against your storage quota.  In order to delete it and free up some storage space, you will need to empty the Deleted Items page.  This was a bit of an annoyance, but not too much.

OK, so let’s go ahead and take a look at the Phone page.  From here, you can view all of your synced PIM data, messages, and media.  The first thing is contacts.  one thing you may notice from the screenshot is that I have no contacts.  Yeah, this is kind of weird.  All of my contacts are synced through my Live account.  But MyPhoto does not sync with Live contacts, and will not sync contacts which are being synced to your Live account.  This really made no sense to me.  It is like the left hand not talking to the right hand.  Incidentally, your contacts will also not sync if you are using an Exchange server.  So, what does that leave us?  Pretty much for this to work right, you had better stick to syncing with Outlook.  Now, I will give MyPhoto the benefit of the doubt on this one.  It is still in an early beta, so hopefully, Microsoft is going to continue to improve this feature and strengthen these sync options.

Next up is the Calendar.  This one really perplexed me.  You can view your calendar by month, day, or list.  In month and day views, all of my appointments showed up and were displayed without any problem (although the boxes on the calendar were too small.)  In list view, however, only events such as birthdays and anniversaries were shown. 

As an aside, I also noticed that day view and list view had some bugs in the display which caused it to be misaligned on the screen. 

Not much to say on tasks, which is next.  I was happy to see that tasks were included, because it is often left off from these online PIM syncing programs.  Nonetheless, I do not tend to use my Windows Mobile phone for tasks anymore.  I use my iPod Touch, which syncs with Toodledo.

Next up are your text messages.  I thought it would have been nice if you could have synced your email inbox as well, but you can’t.  It also would have been nice if you cold send a new text message.  but you can’t do that either.  Pretty much all you can do here is archive your messages.  Nice, but I was expecting more.

Finally, you can store your multimedia files: pictures, videos, music, and documents.  Like text messages, however, you cannot open and view these items.  You can only see a thumbnail in the sidebar information box.  This is a fantastic way to store larger files, which you want to be able to access, but do not want to carry around on your phone.  The one annoying thing I did note, however, was that you cannot take batch actions with these items.  You can check multiple checkboxes, but if you selected archive to web or delete, then that action will only be taken on one item.  This makes things a bit tedious, I have to say. 

The other problem I noted here was that you can choose to sync all of your files or none.  Photos or no photos.  There needs to be more control here over your sync options.  If you keep your photos, videos, or other media files in multiple folders, then you should be able to designate which folders will sync, thus allowing you to sync only the photos which you might wish to archive and skip the rest.

In the end, I really liked MyPhone, and I think Microsoft is heading well in the right direction with this one.  I am glad to see that it is still in an early beta, because I do think there is a lot of work to be done.  Most notably, there needs to be more control over which files and information is synced. 

For now, though, we can call Myphone a rousing success and a fantastic start.  Like I said at the beginning, it is a good hit, but not yet a home run.  Hopefully, the coming months will bring further development of this program, and by the time Microsoft announces a final release, I can come back and call it a home run!

Check it out at http://myphone.microsoft.com (no www. prefix)