Microsoft My Phone is a service for backing up data from your Windows Phone to the cloud. Here on MobilityMinded we wrote a few times about Microsoft My Phone, because we really like this service. Remo wrote an interesting article in February 2009, when My Phone launced. Back in October 2009, on the launch date of Windows Mobile 6.5 I wrote an article about the My Phone premium services.

A live example of the advantages of My Phone Premium Services can be found on the twitter account of John Obeto, CEO and Chief Technology Officer of Logikworx, Editor-in-chief of AbsolutelyWindows.com posted a live example how the My Phone premium services worked for him.

Thought I lost my LG Expo in a cab, but thanks to Microsoft My Phone, it was discovered in the hotel lobby when it sent a high-pitched ring.

Microsoft listened to the users and their wishes about the My Phone service and added 3 features to My Phone.

New Features

1) Quickly update and manage you contact conveniently from you PC.

Since I synchronize my contacts with a hosted exchange environment from sherweb, I haven’t been able to see the “contacts” part in Microsoft My Phone. So in order to test this correctly I disabled my Exchange connection and made a “Dummy” Contact List on My HTC Touch Pro 2. The contacts were pushed correctly to the My Phone Cloud. The new feature is that it is now possible to manage the contacts on the My Phone website. So I added an email address and a Nickname. Both were correctly send over to the HTC Touch Pro 2 on the next sync.

Contacts can be added, deleted, archived and even duplicate contacts can be found. This feature looks very similar to the exchange contact-sync feature which I totally like!

2) Easily download, upload and share you photos.

Photo synchronization already was an option in My Phone. But now Microsoft added a feature on the My Phone website to share the photo’s with social networks.

This is made really simple by selecting one or more photos on the My Phone website and click the “Share Photos” button on the top of the screen. After selecting the sharing services (you can choose from Windows Live, Myspace, Facebook or Flickr) the photos are being uploaded to that specific (one or more) service.

3) Use Wi-Fi to sync your content

The whole test for this article was done by Wi-Fi sync when Wi-Fi is available. This has 2 main advantages. It is quicker and you don’t necessarily have to have a data-plan to use My Phone.

The next time a user of the My Phone application will syc with the My Phone service they will have to update the My Phone software on their Windows Phone.

Concluding thoughts.

I personally think that My Phone is a great service. I am always looking for a way to make users of phones aware that when they loose their phone, notebook or any other device containing personal data, they’ve got a good backup of their data.
Microsoft My Phone is a great service for backing up data from your phone. I case your phone gets lost, stolen or want to transfer your data to an other Windows Phone, My Phone is the service you need.

Yesterday was the day that Microsoft Launched Windows Mobile 6.5, Windows Phones and Windows Marketplace. In addition to these announcements, Microsoft also upgraded their My Phone service. First of all: the My Phone service, covered by Remo a couple of months ago, isn’t in beta anymore and is public to any Windows Mobile user. Go to http://myphone.microsoft.com and signup!

With the upgrade of My Phone, Microsoft included a few extra features.

Archive Items

When archiving in Microsoft My Phone, you basically free-up space data you don’t need directly anymore on your phone. If you have hundreds of Text-Messages or Photos, there are for sure going to be some items you don’t want to keep on your device but definitely want to keep available to you.
Then it is possible to archive these items which means that they will be deleted from your Windows Phone but still will be available in the My Phone web account’s archive section.

Share Photos

You can easily share pictures you took with a number of social networking services. Currently these services are Flickr, Facebook and MySpace. Sadly Twitter isn’t included at this moment, but I hope this service will be added soon too. Sharing photos is possible on 2 ways: Via the My Phone web account and via the My Phone application on your Windows Phone.

If you want to upload a picture to Flickr via the My Phone application on your Windows Phone you need to set up the Flickr service on the web account first (due to the Flickr authorization model).

A close discription of sharing photos can be found on the My Phone help site

Locate your Windows Phone

With the Locate or erase service you can login on your My Phone web account and click on the phone you would like to Locate. The locate functionality shows a Map with the location of the phone when it was last synced with the My Phone service. If GPS is enabled the location shown on the map is more accurate.

Premium Services

Besides the Share and Archive services Microsoft introduces My Phone “Premium Services”. These services won’t be free of charge, but will give a Windows Phone user the ability to take a few actions when the device is lost.

Ring your phone

If you’ve lost your phone you can go to the web account of your My Phone and choose to ring your phone. The phone will start to ring EVEN if you set your phone to mute or vibrate. The phone will ring for 60 seconds and when you look at the phone a message will appear on the screen that the owner (with the registered “Live” email address) is looking for his device.

Lock your Phone

The new My Phone service also gives you the possibility to Lock your device remotely via the web account of My Phone. If you’ve lost your device or if your device is stolen this is a good way to secure your private data.

In the web account enter a 4-digit PIN number and a optional message to display on your phone’s homescreen. The optional message can contain 53 characters, more than enough to enter a telephone number (please not your own cell-number) or an email address.

Erase your phone

The third premium service is to erase your Windows Phone completely. With this My Phone service you have the possibility to erase all the content of your phone AND storage card. Using this functionality your device will be restored to factory settings and of course will also loose it’s connection to the My Phone service. But if you’ve got a lot of confidential information on your Phone and Storage card and your phone is lost, this is a perfect option to make sure your data is not viewed by strangers.

Thoughts & Wrap-up

The My Phone update is really impressive to me. Normally when beta software is going public you would notice some bug-fixes and speed improvements. Microsoft managed to add some really nice features to the My Phone service. The premium services can be a real life saver if you’ve lost your phone, or someone stole your phone. Overall I would say My Phone is a must-have for every Windows Phone user. So go over to http://myphone.microsoft.com on your PC and http://mobile.microsoft.com/myphone on your Windows Phone and start using My Phone!