Microsoft MyPhone and Nokia Ovi Information

Microsoft My Phone

My Phone can sync pretty much all the data on a phone. The full list is: Contacts, Calendars, Tasks, Text messages, Photos, Videos, Music, and Documents. For phones with memory cards, My Phone can be used to sync the photos, videos, music, and documents on the cards, as well as those in the phone's main memory.

Microsoft's MyPhone is the solution at least for users of Windows phones. It is a simple back-up service, still in limited testing, that uploads pictures and any other data from a phone to a Microsoft data center via the Internet.

Users can then log on to myphone.microsoft.com and tweak or download the pictures and data. Usage is as simple as it gets: the service works on its own, quietly downloading files when the phone is not in use.

Share on Ovi

Share on Ovi is the online service that makes sharing media a part of your everyday life. With Share on Ovi, you can share photos, videos, audio, and other media from your PC, Mac or camera phone with one easy step. You can share your content with family, friends, clubs, or the whole world—no sign up or membership is required for recipients to view the media you have shared with them.

Storage

To someone who has used Nokia's comparable "Share on Ovi" service since it was launched in early 2008 for storing and sharing photos, MyPhone is shocking at first: it offers total storage of just 200 megabytes. That's enough for only a few rolls of pictures with a good quality camera.

A Microsoft official plays this down, saying 200 megabytes should be enough for most users, and if demand shows more is needed, the company is flexible.


Sharing options

Nokia's Share has more features than MyPhone, like links to other services and sharing options. It has no data limits apart from one that stops people downloading single files larger than 100 megabytes, big enough for a decent video recording.

Microsoft My Phone makes it easy to view photos on your computer that were taken with your camera phone. From your web account, you can save photos to your computer or can e-mail them to family and friends.

Design

Starting to use MyPhone is pretty much pain free. It takes a couple of minutes to download the file to the cell phone. Then you restart the phone, and the service is up and running. It works, and you don't have to do anything.

By contrast, although logging on to Nokia's "Share on Ovi" site on the Internet surprises positively with an attractive new design, using the service can present problems.

To make usage from a cell phone easier, Nokia has linked a small upload icon to every picture on the phone -- but leaves the uploading work to the user.

Uploading photos

Once you click on the icon and choose the access point to the Internet, the phone starts to send the file into the Nokia cloud.

But if you choose the next picture and click on upload, you get an error message -- the service declines to send it as the other file transfer is still ongoing. On the next try, the phone says "service not responding."

"Back-up and restore services are important to users, but they must be simple and intuitive to use. Such services deliver loyalty from users and allow providers to understand more about their customers," says analyst Paolo Pescatore from research firm CCS Insight.