Mobical as an online backup for your mobile phone contacts.

The pitch: I wanted to transfer all my contacts to a second mobile phone but something went wrong* and I lost many phone numbers from my mobile.  The story is a little bit longer but it doesn’t really serve the purpose of this post. (*: I messed up)

The piece that is important is that it forced me to think more appropriately about backup and restore for my phone contacts’ list.

Let’s be fair, like many of us, I store many phone numbers on my mobile only and do not have a copy of them somewhere else. Should you loose that phone number’s list on you mobile, you could collect them back investing some effort and time.  It turns sour when you think about having to retype them by dozens on your mobile: time consuming and rather boring. Best would be to have an electronic copy somewhere that you could automatically upload on your mobile.

I found, amongst others, this good article from mobilementalism: Top 5 Ways To Backup and Safeguard Your Mobile Data. I recalled about Zyb from a discussion I had with a good friend of mine 2 years ago: I didn’t liked the “social dimension” of Zyb. I didn’t know about Mobical.net nor Mobyko.com. I discarded Mobyko because I’m not ready yet to pay for a online backup of my mobile phone data.

Here is my review of Mobical.

The first impression that I have accessing the website is very pleasant: Simple, light, no bling-bling. I notice that the Mobical home page is https by default.

Browsing the “About” section provides you a lot of good info. Mobical is a demonstration service from Tactel. … Mmmm… I wonder if the Mobile Phone Backup service offered by Proximus to its customers is built from Tactel’ solution. I’m investigating on this.

You can verify that your mobile is compatible with Mobical on this page: Certified Devices.

Registering an account is very easy: minimal number of information to provide. Then you need to configure your mobile phone to synchronize with Mobical. I used the automatic configuration approach (via SMS) but manual steps exist too.

Mobical can synchronize the following components: calendar, contacts, appointments, tasks, notes, bookmarks, and SMS. Bear in mind that there is no automatic/scheduled synchronization. You have to do it yourself, initiating it from your mobile phone.

I must say that I did not test extensively all the features except how my phone contacts were handled. This is indeed useful if you want to add multiple contacts or modify details of your existing contacts. Import is possible using vCard file. Last but lot least, export is also available, outputting in a vCard file (vCard version 2.1). The interface for adding, editing an entry is a pop-up window generated by the webpage itself.

There are 3 additional sections on the page “My Account”. The section “Settings” is all about configuring Mobical for you. The section “Backups” is the master piece: you have here the possibility to create multiple backup/restore sets of your data, storing them online. Finally, the section “History” shows you all the synchronizations that you triggered from you mobile phone.

If you want more details about what kind of experience Mobical is about, give it a try!

Conclusion:

I wanted a online service that provides backup for my mobile contacts list and that could restore them should I lose my phone or some of my phone numbers. Does Mobical fulfill my needs ?  Yes it does, … easily and nicely.