S60Tips.com

Contacts synchronization is always one of the hottest topic in the mobile device. There are basically two ways of doing contacts synchronization, i.e.

• Offline; meaning you don’t need Internet connection to do synchronization.
• Online; meaning your contacts are backup to an online server.

Offline

• Microsoft Outlook. I am pretty sure that many of you have been using PC Suite to synchronize your contacts to Microsoft Outlook. The latest PC Suite even supports synchronization to Windows Vista contacts.
• Apple’s Mac. Mac users may also be familiar with iSync. Personally I’ve never tried iSync yet because I don’t have Mac. However, I heard that this product is awesome; just like any other Apple’s products.
• Mozilla Thunderbird. There were some discussions about contacts synchronization to Mozilla Thunderbird. Until today, I haven’t managed to synchronize between S60 devices and Thunderbird. There is a product, called NokSync to synchronize Nokia phones. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work with S60 devices.

Online

Online backup for contacts is getting increasingly more popular these days. There are many companies out there that are providing online backup service. My favorite online backup services are:

• Plaxo
• Zyb
• Mobical

Plaxo uses proprietary protocol for synchronization; while the other two, Zyb and Mobilcal, supports SyncML. For those who are not familiar with SyncML, it is a platform independent information synchronization standard from OMA (Open Mobile Alliance).

I am going to discuss online backup in the next postings. So… stay tune…

Bonus Links

• Contacts Synchronization with Plaxo
• Anything About Synchronization
• It is getting easier to sync your cell phone with Linux box

Update (01-Oct-2007): Added some bonus links.

Nokia Beta Labs has just released a new application, called Conversation. It is an application that allows us to follow conversations, organized by individual contacts. It is similar to the way we use IM (Instant Messaging) application. You can click a contact and see history of conversations that you had with that person.

Click here to download Conversation

There’s nothing much I can say about this application unless that it is cool. IMHO, it should have been part of S60 Messaging application from the beginning.

Mowser is a new service allows us to view Web on our mobile phone. Mowser takes XHTML pages and transcodes them so that we can see them on the mobile device’s screen. There are two advantages of transcoding:

• The data transferred to your device will be less than the original ones. If you don’t have unlimited data plan, this will save you some money.
• Many Web sites are not designed for small screen of mobile device. Personally, I don’t like doing horizontal scrolling. Mowser will reformat the page so that you don’t need to do horizontal scrolling.

The idea is actually not new. A couple of months back, I have reviewed Skweezer, which offer the same service. Opera Mini also has similar service with different approach.

Mowser is founded by Russel Beattie, a famous blogger in the mobile world. He used to have work for Yahoo! before he decided to start and develop Mowser.

What can we do with Mowser? You can enter a URL of a Web site and transcode it to mobile version. The screenshot below shows S60.com viewed without Mowser.

The following pictures show S60.com viewed from Mowser. As you can see, now you don’t need to do horizontal scrolling.

One feature that I really like from Mowser is that you can search information from many different services by using keywords. For example:

• “gs” to search on Google Web.
  “ys” to search on Yahoo Web.
  “ls” to search on Microsoft’s Live.com.
  “eb” to search on eBay.
  “wi” to search on Wikipedia.
  and many more

The following picture show some example of search feature using Yahoo!

This one is searching using eBay.

Bonus Links

• Faster and Cheaper Web Loading with Skweezer
• Featured Freeware - Opera Mini
• Wikipedia on S60 Devices