Oh, my phone! Microsoft’s slip-up

Just when it was looking like hardware would generate all the excitement at Mobile World Congress, Microsoft came along and caused a frenzy by accidentally revealing information about its new My Phone service when the Web site went live early. The service was previously referred to as Skybox, and the site Getskybox.com redirects to a page with details about the free MyPhone synchronizing service.

There are just enough details to whet your whistle: Users can back up their phone data on a password-protected Web site, making it painless to synchronize and restore up to 200MB worth of contacts, photos, calendar appointments, tasks, videos, SMS messages, music, and documents. They seem to be pretty serious about the storage limit; if you try to sync more information, you’ll receive an error message and the files will not be saved.

Photos can be shared, saved to your computer, or e-mailed. Plus, the phone information can be viewed and managed through a browser. If you use your My Phone Web account to make any changes to contacts or calendar appointments, the phone will register them the next time it syncs. My Phone’s recommended setting automatically backs up information once per day unless the phone cannot connect to the default network.

Only phones that run Windows Mobile 6 are eligible. And My Phone doesn’t play well with Exchange servers, which limits the number of users. Because Microsoft is offering a smallish amount of storage space, and My Phone will be an invite-only beta, the lack of Exchange support is probably by design — but don’t be surprised if that changes at the end of the beta cycle.