Those of us that use Microsoft MyPhone may have noticed the quick note from Microsoft that the service will be down from Monday 05-Oct-09 to Tuesday –

Microsoft My Phone Service Upgrade

On October 5^th, 2009 at 5AM (Pacific Daylight Time) (check your local time here) the Microsoft My Phone service will be unavailable while we upgrade the service.  The service will come back online on October 6^th, 2009 Tuesday morning PDT.  Stay tuned for more information.  You can also  follow us on http://twitter.com/msmyphone for updates.

An extended outage is not anticipated, so everything should be good to go for the WM 6.5 Launch on 06-Oct-09.

Just a quick heads up, the mobile client for Microsoft’s MyPhone service, got an update today. There aren’t any obvious differences, except doing multiple syncs with the service are remembered and get quicker.

Which probably means that using the scheduling option, is more of a viable choice now, consuming much less data.

As for the online portal, it seems a little better at the moment, but it is time intensive to archive all of your data there, a great thing would be a ‘select all’ option for archiving your data. Nice to see though that MS are continuing to improve, what is intended to be an integral service in their ongoing mobile development.

All you have to do to get the update is open the client on your phone and sync, at the end of synchronisation you  will get an update message, you have a choice to delay the update as well.

Thanks to @EdHans for the news!

If you’re like me. and have tried the Windows My Phone service out a little bit, but decided that it’s still a bit half baked, undercooked, to be a viable stand alone syncing service for your WinMo phone you probably didn’t set it to update automatically. Besides the fact that you are going to need an unlimited data plan, to support this function, there might be a few tricks that you are missing if you don’t manually sync regularly. One feature that a lot of people have missed is the fact that any updates to the phone side app, are notified, applied at the end of the syncing process.

Now this is not insider info, I noted a tweet this afternoon from @MSMyPhone, dropped the information, so I manually synced when I got home and Viola, an update to be sure. Not sure what it fixes exactly, and the only thing I could find about it at the MyPhone Blog or user forum was this mention,

The update fixes an issue with regards to syncing documents to the device.
Please install the update and everything would work fine.
Thanks
Ravi
Microsoft My Phone Team
Update: http://myphoneteam.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!500D40C76E07BE24!192.entry

So there you have it, you know as much as I do about this now 

Microsoft’s new My phone sync service, is still in Beta and it is well at best, offering up a variable service, for many users. The inconsistency seems to be at the online end of the service, not the phone end. I signed up for the Beta as soon as it was announced, and finally today, after a tweet from MyPhone, I went and tried to sign in again, and I was in. When Doug did his quick look a couple of days ago, he didn’t really talk about the time it takes to do your initial set up, and sync, and for me patience is a virtue, that i don’t have for the most part, So if it was going to take an interminable amount of time I’m very likely to cancel the process and write it off as a work in progress and come back when it gets less fail worthy. What actually happened for me was very similair to what a lot of people are experiencing, my data is synced, and there, but the online portal is not translating it the way it should, so it becomes a WinLose situation, I’ve successfully cloud synced my phone, but the ways I can manipulate that data online is my digital Achilles’ heel. So here’s a graphical timeline of the initial set up and sync, for your “I want to know if it’s worth taking the time to worry about this” pleasure.

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