Microsoft has opened the beta of its My Phone cloud-based synchronization service to the public, giving the masses a chance to test drive Microsoft's counterpart to Apple's MobileMe service.
The free My Phone service lets users back up their smartphone data to up to 200 megabytes of storage space on a Microsoft-hosted Web site, and makes this information accessible through a Web browser. The idea is to give smartphone users an easy way to restore data to a lost or stolen device, or to quickly migrate data from an old device to a new one.
Microsoft launched the My Phone beta in February at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but limited distribution to a select group of testers. In a Monday blog post, the My Phone Team said Microsoft recently upgraded the My Phone Web portal and in the coming weeks will offer an update to the My Phone software that runs on Windows Mobile devices.
In Microsoft's user forum for My Phone, users have aired a variety of minor concerns about the service, including the inability to synchronize data between My Phone and Exchange, and service outages stemming from system maintenance. These are reminiscent of glitches that early MobileMe users encountered, which caused great embarrassment for a company that takes pride in offering a stellar user experience.
Of course, Apple charges a fee for MobileMe subscriptions, while Microsoft, at least for now, is offering My Phone free of charge. It's a safe approach for Microsoft, which is putting many eggs in the cloud computing basket and is aware that outages of any sort in a paid service would give its detractors plenty of ammunition.
