Ovi Sync now available, Ovi.com gets personal
Published by Rafe Blandford at 16:47 UTC, August 28th 2008
The gradual roll out of Ovi.com and Ovi services continues. Newly available is Ovi Sync which syncs contact, calendar, to-do and notes between your handset and the Ovi.com web site. The front page of Ovi.com is now personalised to show synced information and, optionally, images streams from Flickr and Share on Ovi. Read on for more.
Ovi Sync allows you to sync contact, calendar, to do and notes entry from your phone to the Ovi.com web site. This acts as a backup, but, perhaps more usefully, also allows you the browse and edit information on Ovi.com. By syncing your data to Ovi.com you'll immediately have all your data available in an online calendar and contact web application. Information that is edited on the web site is copied back to the phone at the next sync.
Setting up a device for sync is straight forward; you fill in your details on the site and Nokia sends a text message with the appropriate settings. A sync is started from the Sync application on your phone. Unfortunately this has to be done manually, which may limit the utility of the service for some.
The Ovi Sync service uses Nokia's new unified log-in service, as does Files on Ovi. Eventually all of Nokia's online services are likely to transition to this account. However both N-Gage and Share on Ovi currently use their own system which can be a little confusing.
Editing a calendar entry on Ovi.com
Contact list on Ovi.com
Ovi Sync is similar to My Nokia Backup. It has a different design (front-end), but uses the same technology on the back end.
With the Ovi Sync component in place, Nokia has also refreshed the design of the front page of Ovi. If you are signed in (e.g. to Ovi Sync), the front page of Ovi.com acts as a personlised dashboard.
Information which has been synced from your phone is shown (e.g. upcoming calendar events), but you can also choose to add image streams from Share on Ovi and Flickr. Each of these is a module/widget (similar to those found on WebTop services such as Netvibes or iGoogle). In due course, we expect to see many more of these modules, both from Nokia and from third parties, to be made available in the future.
In effect, this is the first real implementation of the web side of the Ovi vision - a doorway to your content and services.
Here's a screenshot of my personalised Ovi home page. You can see information that has been synced from my phone (Your events, Your to-do list, Your notes and Your contacts) as well as image streams from Share on Ovi and Flickr.
Ovi has always been intended to be a three pronged strategy - phone, web and PC. It is interesting to note that version 1.0 of Ovi Suite for PC (effectively a rebadged version of PC Suite) has been made available for download on the site. The same page mentions that Ovi Suite for Mac is coming soon.
Rafe Blandford, All About Symbian
Categories: Software, Links of Interest, Editorial Thoughts
Platforms: S60 3rd Edition
News Discussion
*sigh*
Is blog available on OVI or is it planned to be added?
maybe Ovi is not still available for us italians? :-/
So cool seeing ovi coming together, now all I need is some kind of email solution in my front page, I'd love to use my fernando@ovi.com address :P
Btw, in my account page I saw this:
Which leads to nseries.nokia.com, that doesn't exist.
I suppose it depends on my network!
Can anyone post the settings here? Which password does Ovi Sync use on the phone? The Nokia Account one or a new one?
I'm in Italy, and, as others in this thread, I didn't receive the text message from Nokia with the settings. I've checked the phone number 3 times (yes, it has the initial +).
Great to see ovi coming together, just looking forward to email and chat too.
Maps, Share, Games, Files, Calendar and Contacts worked fine with Firefox, now I only have to go back to IE for music.
Just a pity the icons for Maps, Music, Share, Games, Files, Calendar, Contacts are not all present when on Music home page, Share home or Files home.
A video service as rumoured?
An e-mail service as implied by the @ovi.com usernames on Nokia Chat?
I'd quite like to see the podcast and internet radio apps integrated into some kind of single Ovi service.
I've been looking for an application like this. Very Happy.
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Originally Posted by freak4mobiles
Thanks for the article... I tried to sync my mobile with my ovi account today.. But it is acting weird.... After syncing my contacts, that some of the contacts are synced properly whereas for some only name is synced without any number.... I dont know what happened.... But i think these are the bugs in the first version.. So as of now I am not happy
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Nokia N95 8Gb Nam - AT&T
1. I already have a google account. And actually a yahoo account, but that just languishes. Point being, it has to be a really compelling reason to switch over. QUESTION: Is the Ovi mail service free? Can it forward mail from other services (like accessing Hotmail with the Gmail interface...gmail allows this)
2. I can get google email and calander. Albiet, I have to use goosync for calander, and that requires actually pusing a button to update. I would bet money that soon people will be able to sync contacts too. More importantly, Google calander, although not the best, does have some group-scheduling functionality. My assisstant puts all my meetings in google calander, which I update wirelessly. There is permissions managment (basic though) sharing of different calanders. I'm also going to guess that Android / google will start allowing multiple calander syncs. So it is fairly good for business. Can Ovi do this?
3. I understand that Ovi will also give a common interface to file sharing/ storage, etc. There are free solutions out there though...most notably google. And Android will have true file SYNC (for office documents anyway). Ok. maybe it wont have that feature when it first comes out...but I would not be suprised. Point is, for the file-storage / sharing feature to be good, it has to have online / offline sync capability.
4. Being in China, I get my music from a number of p2p sites / systems and I pay $1.25 for CDs. That being said, the nokia music store to me is not a compelling feature. iTunes store is not compelling either, and when I did use a iPod (before I got frustrated with its low battery life and gave it away), I disabled the store features. iTunes IS a great interface...except for all the crap that comes with it and installs on the computer. I really think that to make the music feature work, the interface has to be THE BEST EVAR. Really...it can be. iTunes is good but can still be better. So Nokia music can be better. Some other features that can make this competitive (besides one-upping Apple on the basic UI) are:
Much better, graphical song-list managment
Integrate over-Wifi control function (to control music playing from computer, and tied in multi-media equipment)
Integrated over-Wifi stream function (to get music to handset)
Tie in to music / album info server like Windows Media player does, only make it more user friendly than WMP
However I suspect that for many these sorts of services will be completely new (think of Nokia's customer base size).
It'll be interesting to see how third party stuff gets integrated into Ovi. Its entirely possible that they could create an email widget / module which linked into Gmail etc - maybe with Nokia email service... One of Nokia key point about Ovi was being open to third parties - we've not really seen much of that yet.
I think its also about ease of use (the point you make with GooSync) and having the complete experience out of the box. Nokia still have a long way to go on this front of course. I think there will always be better individual services out there 9and Google is going to provide serious overall competition), but for pure breadth of service Ovi is / will be compelling. I wouldn't necessarily advise people to start using it now, but it is a pointer for the future.
The calendar experience you mention is interesting - I suspect most would see that as an Enterprise function and use Exchange or Intellisync for something like that. That said I think multiple syncs would be great (e.g. among a family) and hope it is something Nokia implements.
The file sharing you talk about if Files on Ovi which is available in its first version.
All I get on the phone is 'Server not responding'.
Anyone else getting this or know how to overcome it? Sync Connection is set up for sync.ovi.com, port 443
Frustrating.
Several versions of Nokia Suite (standard, N, Ovi), multiple logins (Ovi, Share on ovi, My Nokia, Nokia shop etc.), several websites with the same functionality (Nokia Backup and now Ovi Sync).
How can they expect "typical" users to understand this?
This reminds me of Microsoft - so big, that it's almost out of control, one group doesn't know what other groups are doing...