Microsoft’s MyPhone Beta And Windows Live

For the past few weeks, I’ve been testing the beta version of Microsoft’s Myphone service, which allows for wireless backup to the web.  Although it delivers exactly what it promises, and does work as a backup, it’s missing the boat in certain areas.

The free service will back contacts, calendar, tasks, photos, music, videos and documents to the cloud, so that even if you lose your phone, you can easily recover the data by running the Myphone service on a new device.  On that account it works fine, as I actually performed a sync, then deleted all my contacts from my phone and was able to restore everything smoothly. Of course I had all my contacts locally backed up “just in case”, but didn’t need it.

Beyond that, however, the service is going to get limited use from me.  Here’s where the problems start.

To back up all of this information, the current allotment of 200Mb is clearly not enough.  These days, 8Gb Micro SD cards can be found for under $20 at some retailers, and once 32Gb cards start shipping, we’ll see a similar drop in 16Gb cards.  There’s no way that 200Mb will ever be serviceable for a comprehensive backup.

To alleviate this Scott Rockfeld, director of Windows Mobile, mentioned in a Boston Herald article that ‘tiered’ pricing for higher data storage capacities may be one possibility.

This is absolutely the wrong direction to go.  I’m not saying this to be cheap either.

Instead of offering more storage for paid users, Microsoft should completely ditch video and audio backup.  Not only are these by far the most data intensive aspects of any backup service, they are also the most likely types of files to already be residing on a user’s laptop or desktop device.

Integrate Myphone with other Windows Live services, in particular one’s Live account.

As it stands, contacts backed up on Myphone can be restored to a new device by installing the software on a new phone.  There is no current relationship between the Myphone contacts and the contacts at the same user’s live.com account.  Luckily, that looks like it’s going to change in the future:

Window Live suite of services provides a fantastic user experience around Contacts, Calendar, Photos and other user needs. We too are big fans and ardent users of these services and it is natural for you all to ask for tighter integration so that all of your personal data is consolidated in one single view. The initial goal for My Phone service was to test the concept and validate that we are solving a real problem for the users. Now that we have a resounding vote of confidence for the service our future plans are moving in this direction. [Myphone blog]

Integrating Myphone.com with the other Live.com services could remove the need to have a separate ‘space’ for phone data, as it could all be part of the 25Gb Microsoft currently provides for free at live.com. Eliminating audio and video would also get around pesky issues of DRM and people ‘accidentally’ sharing music and movies.

Microsoft has spent a lot of time and resources making live.com ALMOST compelling. Although fractured in it’s current state, it seems Microsoft is finally starting to see the light and bringing things together. Now if they could take that beyond Windows Mobile devices…