SharpCast - mobile synchronisation

Oliver has posted an excellent overview of SharpCast – a ‘syncrhonisation 2.0’ service aiming to help you synchronise your data across PC, web and mobile.

I was momentarily interested. But it’s not that useful to me at this time as it works only for Windows and Windows Mobile.

I’m primarily a Mac user and I use Symbian like no tomorrow with the N90. What’s more, Foldershare, now owned by Microsoft, does an absolutely phenomenal job of doing synchronising my data across my PCs and Macs.

I’m interested in the SharpCast concept — and what they might offer in the future. At this time though, I want to get my data OFF my mobile, not on to it. For example, I have about 200gb of data kept in perfect sync by Foldershare across 7 machines in 3 timezones. My photo library, now more or less exclusively on Flickr, is 100s of meg in size — due in part to the fact that each picture I take is now at least 0.5meg in size. I’ve only got a paltry 1gb memory on the Nokia N90 at the moment.

As for getting images from my mobile — ShoZu does a fine, fine job of this. But I can see the potential. I can see the day when it’d be rather useful to have my documents accessible on the mobile and my music synched.

I wonder, though, are we really… realistically… years away from being able to walk about with a mobile sized device that can cope with 200gb of data, easily? Aren’t we better building systems that allow thin client access to the data ‘in the sky’?

Either way the moment SharpCast do something with Mac or Symbian I’ll have a go.