Last weekend my Nokia N900 was stolen. With hundreds of contacts, losing the device was horrible, but losing my contacts was a nightmare. I did make a backup a few months ago, but that means that some of my newer contacts are lost. While the N900 does have a backup feature for contacts, it makes a lot of sense to have this process happen automatically and store these contacts into the cloud. We usually don’t think of these until it happens to one of us. This is one of those times where I wished I made more frequent backups, but that I also wished the N900 had feature that stores contacts into the cloud. Funny thing is that Nokia does have such a feature and it’s called Ovi Contacts. Sadly, after many months it still only a Symbian exclusive.
Why? There’s absolutely no reason why the N900 can’t support this feature. There’s onboard support for OVI chat and even files can be uploaded to OVI, so why no support OVI contacts stored into the cloud?
It’s true that I should make regular backups, doing so would save me a lot of headache! But fact is that the average user won’t bother making any backups and that both the average and power user will simply we forget to this. For this reason the process should be transparent and automatic, and should at least allow some level of customization when it comes to the frequency it makes backups. Nokia should enable this feature and allow activation through a one-time setup. Such a feature can be a life saver, but Nokia you should at least enable this for us N900 users.
As a N900 owner, do you wish it had an automatic backup feature that stores contacts into the cloud?
I absolutely do wish. Thankfully, my data ecosystem is based on Google Apps and that works really well for me. There are some glitches. But I don’t understand why Ovi wouldn’t be supported on the N900. Makes no sense to me. I have to think that with the MeeGo push they will need to make this a possibility — and they should do it in such a way that they kill two birds.
Nokias’ lackluster support of Maemo/Meego and the N900 is why I will most likely be moving to an android handset when my next upgrade is due. It’s becoming clearer and clearer the hardware is becoming less important and the apps and apps stores more important and next to Apple Googles’ app store is probably the best.
I think your article is quite true, for the average user backups should be done fully automatic.
For myself, I do not like to have my private data copied into the cloud. I prefer to deal with backups myself. And the N900 has a real OS, namely Linux, which makes making backups real easy and a complete nobrainer!
I just open a terminal on my Mac, type the “up” arrow until the command “rsyncN900″ appears and press enter. That’s it. It will move my newest photos on the Mac and backup everything that has changed since last time. Easy to do even several times a day. (In fact I am doing it just for the photos, but then, all else is backuped too.)
ditto…am losing faith day by day….is it time to bin the N900 and Nokia forever?