Microsoft My Phone
Written by Alan Wednesday, 12 May 2010 08:00
A while back Microsoft released My Phone to relatively little attention. I installed it as soon as I saw it and then I too payed little attention to it. Oh, I made sure it worked correctly – it did, but beyond that I really never thought about it.
Then I needed it. Somehow (and I still don’t know how it happened) I lost all of my contacts on my phone. Suddenly My Phone became a lifeline. I went to the web site and made sure my contacts were still there. They were. Then I set it to reinstall on the next sync. I pulled out my phone and did a manual My Phone sync and all of my contacts reappeared!
It’s simple to install from the Marketplace. And, once installed, it sets itself to run automatically every day at 3am. You can change this by going to Menu => Sync Schedule. It backs up:
- Current Location
- Contacts
- Calendar
- Tasks
- Text Massages
- Browser Favorites
- Photos
- Videos
- Music
- Documents
- Storage Cards
All of this information can be viewed, restored and browsed on the My Phone website.
You can pick and choose which of these you want to back up by going to Menu => Sync Options.
Want to automatically share your photos on a social network? Go to Menu => Share Photos => Social Networks and you can choose from:
And that brings me to one of the drawbacka I have found. I use Twikini as my phone’s Twitter client, which shows TwitPic photos inline. These and various program icons are backed up and appear on the website under My Photos. I can go to the site and delete them and tell it to delete them from my phone upon next sync, but I shouldn’t have to.
The other drawback is the lack of support in the Social Networks for both Picasa and, ironically, Microsoft’s own Skydrive. These drawbacks are all simple fixes and, hopefully, will be taken care of in a future update.
Those last items aside, I can’t help but be grateful for the restoration of my Contacts, which alone is reason enough to use this program on your Windows Phone. A couple of kinks are not exactly out of the ordinary in any program, and the good here far outweighs the bad.
Related posts:
- Website Review – Soocial
- Windows Phone 7 Series Around the Web
- 5 Good Windows Mobile Apps
- Netflix Coming Windows Phone 7
- Windows Mobile Device Center
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Alan Buckingham. Alan Buckingham said: Microsoft My Phone http://goo.gl/fb/thGoZ [...]
[...] many mobile operating systems from Android to iOS and going way back to Windows Mobile, which used Microsoft MyPhone. Ironically Microsoft didn’t include a backup solution for their new flagship mobile [...]