Russell Beattie Notebook

Yahoo! Mobile Services: SyncML and More

Posted on Monday, January 9th, 2006 3:06 PM

This is one of those posts with my Yahoo! cap firmly on, okay? good.

Some of the response to the Yahoo! Go Mobile announcement was disappointment that it was limited to only a certain set of phones, so I wanted to point out some of the other mobile services from Yahoo! that don't require a smart phone. First, the beta of the SyncML service was soft-launched a few weeks ago, but I've been telling people about it and using it myself and I have to say it's pretty great. If you have one of the following ten phones (lots more to be added soon once the kinks are out) then you can use SyncML to get your non-smart phone's Contacts and Calendar info syncronized to your Yahoo! account:

To get started just go to the Yahoo! Mobile Contacts Backup page and choose your phone, and it'll either give you instructions, or send you off a link (if you live in the U.S. I assume - we're still moving towards more international services, but it's a slow process). If you know what you're doing, you can enter in the SyncML info yourself, though only on these phones as we filter at the server (I've tried... ;-) ).

For example, on the Motorola phones: Enter SyncML settings section, select “[New Entry]†from the Sync Partners list and enter the following:

That's definitely one of the best services we have - I can't wait to see it support more phones.

Also, remember that you can also post photos to Yahoo! Photos, Flickr and 360 Blogs via MMS and email. And check your carrier deck, as each one has additional ways of accessing Yahoo! Mail and IM as well - Cingular, for example, has a downloadable Java application for both, and many new phones have Y! Messaging built in using the common IM client.

Yahoo!'s SMS and WAP search is also the best out there, so I would take a minute and add a bookmark and addressbook entry for 92466 as well.

Hope that helps someone out there!

-Russ