That made me realize, in this time and age, when people are so dependent on storing contact numbers in their phone, it is more important than ever that our connection with friends should not be severed by a single point of failure, our phone. People should be backing up their contacts somewhere else, such that when disaster strikes their phone (fingers crossed don’t happen), it should be a simple task of restoring their latest contacts, rather than trying to ask their friends one-by-one via email or facebook for their contact numbers.

I periodically (as much as daily, or a few times a week) syncs my contacts, calendars, and tasks from my Nokia E90 to Mac’s iCal and Address Book via iSync. Sync-ing is done via Bluetooth, so I just need to have my phone within 5-7 metres of my Macbook, launch iSync, and click on “Sync Devices”. As simple as that. Calendar entries from iCal are then synced in the background to Google Calendar. I don’t sync any contacts to online services. Maybe I should, but in the mean time, I trust Time Machine backup that keeps me safe up to the last hour of my data. Good enough for me.

There are TONS of online services, most of them are free, that allows you to sync your contacts (and possibly calendars) from your phone to that online service. Check out Windows Live Contacts and Windows Live Calendar for you Microsoft and MSN users out there or Google Sync for Gmail fans.

Do you backup the data in your phone? How, and where?

For someone who uses Google Docs and Spreadsheets for storing documents and collaboration with friends, the ability to finally be able to edit them on the phone is a great  news.

Until today, I’ve only been able to view documents and spreadsheets, and I have to wait until I get to a desktop or laptop in order to edit them.

To check out these new capabilities, just go to http://m.google.com/docs in your mobile browser and log in. If you are like me who uses Google Apps, I go to http://docs.google.com/a/hendrikch.com.

Available for Android, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Symbian S60 (high-end Nokia) phones.

So far, I’ve watched all kind of sports, on the road in the bus and MRT, and at home when channel 5 doesn’t show the game I wanted to watch.

This is only the fourth day I watched Olympics on my mobile phone, and I’ve already hit an astonishing 700MB of data transfer.

With Olympics still due to end in a couple of days, expect me to hit 1GB transfer very soon

I tried streaming China vs Brazil soccer match LIVE on my mobile phone, and here’s the data usage after the first half. Astonishing 85MB of data transfer !! The quality are as you would expect on a mobile phone screen, but you could still watch the match with enough detail, and there were no lag or pause felt during the whole of first half.

This must have been the most data I ever transferred to my mobile phone ever since I started having the data plan. The good thing is I can now watch Olympics matches LIVE anywhere in Singapore, simply superb !! No more boring bus or MRT trips

Another “killer app” that is coming up in the horizon is syncing capabilities across devices. Most of us owns few devices, home PC, office PC, maybe laptop, and mobile phone. The problem most of us face (or at least I face) was to sync simple things like calendars, tasks, emails, to bigger items like documents and files across all those devices.

Until recently, this has been a chore. Even syncing calendar items from Google Calendar to my mobile phone was pretty troublesome. With Google Calendar Sync, that sync Google Calendar with Outlook, which then I use Nokia PC Suite to sync between Outlook and my Nokia E90, at least I have some solution that works for Calendar.

How about files and documents? So far, I have been putting my documents that I want to access anywhere in Google Docs, but there are many other documents that remains in my home PC, and thus inaccessible from anywhere else.

Microsoft has some solutions, that are frankly still quite disjointed. Skydrive is a free 5GB online storage that allows you to store pretty much anything. You can create folders, upload files, share folders, etc.

Think of it as your free online storage. I know some people who uses their Gmail as their online storage, but c’mon, Gmail is email, not a proper online storage. I use Skydrive lately to share and send some big files, and the files will still be there indefinitely, unlike YouSendIt. The problem with Skydrive? I need to remember to upload my recently edited documents into Skydrive, or else what I have in Skydrive and what I have in my desktop will be different.

Second product is Foldershare.

So far, I have used Foldershare to sync documents between my home PC and my Macbook. I can edit any documents in my Macbook while I’m watching TV in the living room, knowing when I switch to my desktop in the study room, the latest file will be there. No need for primitive way of copying to thumbdrive from one machine and putting it to another machine. So far, so good. One limitation though, both devices need to be on in order for sync to happen.

The latest one to enter the fray was Live Mesh.

The idea is simple. You select some folders that you would like to sync with other devices (up to 5GB limit), and that’s it. Live Mesh client will upload all your documents to be sync-ed to Live Desktop, and then sync those files with all other devices that you may have added to the circle. Unlike Foldershare that is only one-to-one, Live Mesh can be many-to-many, including PC, Mac, and mobile phones. Also, using Live Mesh, your files are available online, so you don’t need to have your machine turned on 24×7. As an added bonus, Live Mesh works with Windows Remote Desktop, so let’s say you’re overseas, and so happen need to access your machine at home miles away, you can go to Live Mesh, and view your other machine’s desktop like you’re sitting in front of it. I read an article recently about a guy made us of Live Mesh to share photos from South Africa to his wife back in US. Paul also love Live Mesh.

Now, you may think why on earth are there so many similar products from Microsoft to accomplish similar thing? I wonder too, and how I wished they’d merge all these into one big solution that has everything. That would have been a winner.

Put it simply, if anyone can create a solution that allows us to have our calendars, tasks, to-do-list, emails, latest version of documents, MP3s, photos, and any other files, anywhere in the world, on any device, PC, Mac, mobile phone, PDA, iPhone, and dare I say, for free, that will be Awesome.

Has anyone of you used any of the online services above?

As I’ve read in forums around the Internet before I decided to sign up, Smugmug support is simply superb. They are very responsive. I repeat, very. I sent them email at 11.20PM, and I got their reply at 11.27PM. An amazing 7 minutes for them to read my email, checked my account, credited my credit card back the differences, and sent the email reply to me. If that’s not impressive for faceless companies on the net, I don’t know what is. You can’t help but feel that you are treated like you are their only customer. Nothing but praise from me. A couple of days later, my credit card was credited with the right amount (albeit a little bit lower as USD depreciates against SGD since November 07 till January 08) right before my credit card statement was sent.

Footnote, if you happen to like to sign up for a Smugmug account yourself, you can use my referral code and enter it, when you sign up, into Smugmug voucher coupon code: C26cqbAfqMjWs. I’ll earn $10 for my next year’s subscription, and you’ll earn $5 yourself, paying $35 instead of $40. Definitely not much, but with this latest impressive support from them, I would whole-heartedly recommend Smugmug for online photo sharing and backup service.

My current “My Pictures” folder size

Warning: Tech talk below, but if you are interested how to backup your ever-increasing photo collections online, read on.

Imagestation announced they’ll move all my photos to another site, Shutterfly, for free. That’s cool, I thought in the first place, until I found out that I couldn’t access my original-sized photos in Shutterfly. I contacted their customer service, and they said that they don’t provide original-sized photos because of technical reason. What??!! When I upload a full 5MP photo into Shutterfly, you tell me 640×480 photo is the only one I’ll ever get? C’mon, be serious. Yeah, they are serious, they don’t provide it. Sad.

And, here I am, looking for a new host for all my photos, and I’m ready to pay for it. I know no free site will host my 30GB photos for free, none. I’ve done some researched over the past one week. PicasaWeb looks good and easy, Flickr is popular though un-organized, but my choice in the end came to either Fotki or Smugmug. Picasa came with free 1GB storage, and it’s $20/year for 10GB or $75/year for 40GB. That’s expensive, and very limited compared to the rest of the competitors. Flickr, on the other hand, offer $24.95/year for the pro account, for unlimited storage, but it’s messy. The only way you can organize your photos is by sets and tags, and that’s messy to me.

Come Fotki and Smugmug, two very well known photo sharing site. Fotki currently offers $30/year for unlimited storage for its Premium account. What drives me to Fotki is its ability to allow FTP access. With FTP access, it’ll be so easy to upload your photos, and to download them in the future should I need it. It allows you to create folders, subfolders, sub-subfolders, and so on, to organize your albums of photos. That’s much better than Flickr‘s. I can easily organize by year, by month, by events, etc. Next competitor is Smugmug, I am currently on their 14-days free trial of Standard accounts. I still have 10 days left to try out their services. A standard account costs $40, the most expensive of all (not considering PicasaWeb), but its features and potential beats the rest. Firstly, it provides an open API, basically an open programming language, so anyone can write any utilities, applications to interface with Smugmug. The result are impressive, there are a number of free applications out there that allow you to upload, download, and do many things with your Smugmug account. ACDSee, which I use, offers Smugmug plugin with their latest ACDSee 10 Photo Manager. Secondly, it allows better organization like Fotki, albeit only two levels, but that’s enough. You can have keywords as you would expect, but you can create ShareGroups, which can turn out to be useful.

For example, the way I categorize my albums is by years and months. Subsequently, I can create ShareGroups that is called “Church“, and pick all the photo galleries across those years and months that has church outings and activities, and I can share that link with my church friends. That way, they’ll see only photos that matter to them, not every single activities of my life in 2007, for example. If there isn’t any major issue I find with Smugmug, I’ll likely sign up for their service before my trial expires.

Anyway, if you happen to like to sign up for a Smugmug account yourself, you can use my referral code and enter it, when you sign up, into Smugmug voucher coupon code: C26cqbAfqMjWs. I’ll earn $10 for my next year’s subscription, and you’ll earn $5 yourself, paying $35 instead of $40. Definitely not much, but it’s a win-win really. Do you use any online photo sharing/backup site? Where do you keep them?