Windows Phone Thoughts: Microsoft Updates My Phone to Version 1.6

If you're not already using Microsoft's My Phone service, you should be. It's free, and offers some really nice features - with version 1.6, they've added the ability for you to manage and edit your contacts from the My Phone Web interface. I can't test this feature because I use a hosted Exchange account [Affiliate] so My Phone doesn't sync my PIM data, but for some people, a service like this is all they need to manage and sync their contacts. It's a shame it doesn't tie into the contacts from Windows Live/Hotmail - hopefully that's coming up soon. v.1.6 also allows you to upload photos from your PC to the My Phone service, which then pushes them down to your phone. Lastly, this new version allows you to sync My Phone using WiFi - which I thought it already did, but apparently not.

Microsoft is rapidly improving the My Phone service, which is great to see. If they can get to the point that it syncs contacts, calendar, and tasks with the Windows Live equivalents directly, that will be a great step forward. You can already do some of that using Windows Live on your phone, but that's limited to a contacts sync. All the pieces are slowly moving together, so I think by the time Windows phone 7 comes out, there will be some really powerful cloud-sync offerings in place from Microsoft.