One of the most touted features in Windows Mobile 6.5, My Phone, is actually available to most phones that run Windows Mobile 6 or later. My Phone automatically backs up your contacts, calendar information, text messages, photos, and other information from your phone to the My Phone site. My Phone is a free service and is similar to the Apple service MobileMe, which also synchronizes email and data, but which has an annual service fee.
Like the iPhone, My Phone seems to be aimed at consumers, not enterprises. Some of My Phone's functions don't work if your phone already syncs with Exchange, and each My Phone account is limited to 200MB of backups. See Jeff James' look at the My Phone beta.
The next version of Windows Mobile is supposed to be a much larger upgrade. Those in the know say that Windows Mobile 7 is a new OS, being written from the ground up, and that it will be done by the end of 2010 at the earliest. There's not much solid information out there about Windows Mobile 7, however, so I won't make any predictions.
The Bottom Line
The iPhone is obviously still a consumer-focused device, but its upgrades have shown Apple is willing to go after the business market, too. And the iPhone has an undeniable popularity—it's new, fashionable, and very easy to expand with software for both entertainment and work. As both IT pros and management pick up the iPhone on its own merits, businesses may have no choice but to support the iPhone. Palm and Blackberry are also joining the trend of smartphones for consumers, advertising low- and high-end devices directly to consumers. And newer phone OSs such as Android and other Linux variations.
Windows Mobile might be losing the war for what consumers think of when they think of smartphones, but for now, it still has a substantial lead in its integration with Exchange and System Center. In the long run, if its competitors improve their business functions and still manage to capture minds and consumer loyalty, Windows Mobile could be in for some rough times.
Cloud computing is a wild card in the smartphone arena. The iPhone's app store is very popular and all of its competitors seem to want to recreate its success, but many of its apps aren't much more than web pages launched like applications. If every smartphone soon sports a high-quality web browser and always-on Internet access, developers could choose to develop web applications tailored to smartphones instead of developing applications for each phone's OS. Cloud computing from a smartphone makes sense—Internet access is delivered wirelessly, so there's a lot less concern about being stuck without Internet than with a Wi-Fi-based laptop, and because of the possibility of loss or theft, it's already a bad idea to keep too much data stored locally on a phone. Just as some predict a near future when desktop OSs will be irrelevant in favor of the cloud, what OS your phone runs could, some day, be unimportant.