This is the era of ‘Live sans Cables’. We hate cables in anything and
everything. We love the mobile phones because it can do most things
without a cable. Synchronizing the phone data wouldn’t be an exception
either. And so i tried some cool yet free Sync services out there.
First let me name them
1. ZYB
2. Mobical
3. O-Sync
4. ScheduleWorld
5. Bloove
A bit of details now.
Signing up for ZYB takes hardly a minute. The automatic settings arrives
the fastest. The features you could sync are the phone contacts and
calendar. The website lets you view and edit your contacts and calendar.
But this feature is so limited. You can have multiple mobiles for a single
account and there is a mobile friendly website at m.zyb.com.
ZYB is more of a sociial networking service.You can set your data to be
shared with your friends. Get intimated about updates. Location(GPS) based
networking is feasible via the application ZYB phonebook
Mobical(beta!) lets you sync your notes and text messages in addition to
contacts and calendar. Almost all data on your phone except the local
files! Settings are sent via SMS. Contacts import/export feature could
come in handy at times. The only downside is that there isnt a mobile
friendly website. The personal page at Mobical is flash based and loads
more than 1MB on my Nokia OSS browser. Quite impossible to deal with the
site on a mobile.
It supports everything the other two supports plus a great website. Its
simple yet very rich. I get a feeling that i have my entire phone on the
website. Viewing messages and editing the phone’s notes, tasks,
contacts(with attributes such as mobile/office/home/fax number, address,
company, job title, email address, etc.) on the PC is as simple as doing
it on the phone. No, its even better!
Social networking is accomplished via ‘Update Me!’ which enables you to
send update requests to your contacts on o-sync. Photos can be added to
contacts online. All of these updates would get right into the phonebook
while synchronizing over the air. Awesome! Sync with outlook/express,
Blackberry can be done by installing appropriate clients.
SW can only sync contacts and calendar. They are in the form of two web
applications, Event/Tasks and Web 2.0 contacts.
Calendars(yeah, multiple!) can be shared with other SW users. google
calendar sync is supported. Contacts can be shared/ imported.
If you are worried about mobile data plans, there is an installable
Firefox bluetooth
addon .
The technical support is the strength of SW. They have a very big help
forum! I only wish the website could have been mobile friendly.
Bloove is a SyncML mobile synchronization client application. (Bloove is the only Non-SyncML based service. Updated as per the comment from ‘Bloove’ themselves) There are both native s60 and J2ME clients. It syncs contacts, messages and even call logs, but it doesn’t
sync calendar. That’s quite weird!
I had some issues with setting up the Bloove Agent on my phone. It didn’t
recognize my phone (Nokia 5320 XpressMusic). I emailed the support, got the response within minutes. My phone model was added to their servers in just 2 days!
Here too, the website is completely flash based and more or less useless
on the phone’s browser.
Of all the above SyncML services its ‘O-Sync’ that won me over. How about
you?
There are three other services that I signed up for,
1) OVI Sync from Nokia
2) GsmSync
3) Anywr
Its been a couple of days since i signed up for OVI but have not received
the settings yet. I did manage to find the manual settings which didn’t
help either. The latter two services give an ‘invalid username/password’
error. I have reported the issue to the respective support team. I will
get back to you when they are up and Syncing.
If you know/use a SyncML service that I had left out, please do mention.
Well, that’s all for now. Time for you to Sync in.
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One problem I had with SyncML is that it doesn’t seem to support synchronizing category information of address book contacts. Was that your experience as well?
Great post! I’ve been on the lookout for an online SyncML PIM myself:
http://acurrie.wordpress.com/tag/pim/
mobyko,synchronica, fusionone, funambol, dashwire, juicecaster are others … some do PIM and media backup. TreasuremyText,GSync and youArchive.it do text backups…
Thanks. This was really helpful. I’ve been using zyb but now I’ve added o-sync to backup my TXT.
Poor article.
WHERE IS OVI SYNC!!!!!!!!!!
rsm -
“One problem I had with SyncML is that it doesn’t seem to support synchronizing category information of address book contacts. Was that your experience as well?”
Are you referring to the address/email/home phone/dob details of contacts?
I can view/edit/sync these category info with no problems via “o-sync”. Other services do not support this.
@Martin. Thanks for mentioning some of the other services that i had missed. I will try them and include them in the update.
@AC. Very nice articles there at your blog. Just that my quest was strictly ‘Mobile’ while yours is a bit broad in its perspective. Nowadays i dont see much beyond my Mobile phone! *Doh*
Bongo McTavish-
Poor article.WHERE IS OVI SYNC!!!!!!!!!
OVI Sync is on its way to my mobile phone! I even tried creating new accounts with new numbers. It wont just reach me!
I am tired of trying out the manual settings suggested at the Nokia discussion website. They always give invalid username/password error and its a known issue.
Hello, thank you for great post, I just want to clarify that Bloove is NOT syncml based. That’s why you can sync sms for old nokia phones, that’s why you can sync contact groups and that is why you can edit your contacts almost online and type sms on web page and send it via your mobile.
Thanks for the heads up Bloove, we’ll make note of it.
@Bloove. Thanks for the insight and the additional info. I will update the post accordingly.