microsoft my phone beta Microsoft continues to build out their cloud-services with the pre-announcement (OK – they goofed and announced the service early on the net by accident) of the upcoming My Phone beta service. Targeted at Windows Mobile 6-based handhelds, this free online service will sync information stored on your mobile phone to a website hosted by Microsoft. The concept’s pretty straight forward – should you lose your phone, have it get stolen, or replace it with a newer model, you can easily restore data to the new or replacement phone. Best part of it all for Windows Mobile users – it’s free!

The service synchronizes a variety of information between your mobile phone and your online web account. According to the My Phone beta information page, you’ll be able to sync the following types of data:

  • Contacts, calendar appointments, tasks, photos, videos, text messages, music, and documents. It will not sync data stored on It will sync Windows Live contacts if you have Windows Live installed on your phone.

There are a couple of caveats:

  • External memory card and SIM card information will not be synced
  • Data stored outside of “My Documents” will not be synced to the service

As you might expect, you can view and edit information on the website which can then be synced back to the mobile phone at a later date. The service by default will sync with your Windows Mobile handset once a date. As for storage limits, you’ll get 200MB of free online space for each My Phone account.

It’s about time Microsoft announced a service like this – Apple announced a similar service back in July of last year called MobileMe. Of course if you’re not interested in web access and backup, you can always sync your desktop PC or notebook using Windows Mobile Device Center.

Expect additional details to emerge at the upcoming Mobile World Congress to be held in Barcelona.

[Check it out via Computer World]

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