Interscription

I was going through the motions of setting up my new windows mobile phone (an AT&T Tilt, upgraded from my aging Verizon 6700), and got to the part where I… install funambol on the phone to sync with www.scheduleworld.com to let me keep my PIM info synched between my home and work pc’s outlook and thunderbird, and of course, my phone. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is.  It’s always been a much more functional than it is pretty. The kind of thing that made people think it was an ordeal and recommend the still-unreleased mobileme for $99.00 instead.

Well, much to my surprise, funambol has launched a beta webhost for its client software, and after tooling around with it for a bit, I have to say, it’s brilliant. Instead of going through a middleman, in this case scheduleworld, you now sign up with a regular old username and password, tell it about your phone, which it will send a txt to with the appropriate client, and you’re off and running. In less than five minutes I had my phone and outlook syncing with the my.funambol portal. Even better, the design has a solid feel to it. Even better, and unlike scheduleworld, you can actually add appointments and contacts to your pim from the website, and there’s apparently built in skype dialing.

The only thing missing from the portal at this point is a webmail viewer. Since it syncs and enables push of your email on the backend, it would be nice if the portal also had a simple mail app built in. It’s a minor complaint, and considering nobody else is offering anything that comes even close, certainly not a deal breaker. Anyway, if you haven’t tried Funambol in a while, or have been scared off by unwarranted negativity… give the public beta a try. Best of all, the price is perfect , coming in at exactly free.