Ubuntu One Gets iPhone App For Contact Sync 115
oneone writes "Canonical is bringing its Ubuntu One cloud service (which we discussed last month) to handheld devices with a new mobile contact synchronization feature that is powered by Funambol. Canonical's Ubuntu One application for the iPhone is now available from the iTunes Music Store. Android and other mobile operating systems will be supported with Funambol's standard client application. The mobile sync feature is currently in the beta testing stage but will be generally available to Ubuntu One subscribers when Ubuntu 10.04 is released later this month. Canonical says that it is boosting its Ubuntu One server infrastructure in order to support what it anticipates will be record loads."
Re:Always-on lifestyle (Score:2, Insightful)
And what does contact syncing between devices has to do with always-on lifestyle?
Re:Available only to subscribers (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, you asked...
Lots of companies make money by selling us a "license" to use the products they provide, rather than letting us buy the product itself. It's becoming more common, so apparently, someone out there has found a "better way for a company to make money than by having people pay them for a product".
Re:Always-on lifestyle (Score:5, Insightful)
At present, if you want your data to be there when you need it to be, you pretty much have to be a bit of a gearhead(not a huge gearhead by any means; knowing about dropbox is way less techy than having your own git repo or secure WebDAV share, or whatever) or you have to engage in frankly infuriating amounts of error-prone manual labour.
File propagation among the people generally is still(even among the youth) at the level of "emailing it to myself", with all the version errors and minor fuckups that that occasions. Synchronizing bookmarks? Pretty much doesn't happen. Cell contacts? unless you can swap the SIM, or have them do it for you at the store, people pretty much just retype them. Bloody dark ages stuff. Even the cases that should work by now(DLNA media sharing in a closed LAN, all devices trusted, is still rather rough around the edges). Even the trivial case of somebody who has a desktop and a notebook/netbook still isn't really there yet. You either sign up for something like Dropbox, which is easy and cheap/free; but depends on an internet connection and is potentially privacy problematic, or you drop fairly big money(Windows Home Server/Small Business Server), or you do it the gearhead way(any one of dozens of permutations of NFS or SMB, or webDAV, or a revision control mechanism, plus a helping of Linux Fu), or you basically just let the two drift apart, occasionally using a flash drive or emailing something to yourself. Pitiful.
Not everybody wants to be connected all the time; but I'm not sure I can think of anybody who wouldn't like having their data and files and bookmarks and whatnot there when they want them, wherever "there" happens to be(within the limits of privacy and security, of course, for the few people who think about that stuff).
Re:Available only to subscribers (Score:3, Insightful)
I personally believe that allowing people to sync their contacts from almost any mobile phone into a Linux desktop is a huge step forward.
Not really. gmail or syncml could already do this, and do it for free (at least, the synchronization worked fine between my Nokia E71, my Droid, and my linux boxes). Your service apparently can't do it for free, and can't even stay up right now. May be, you just meant to say "a huge step backward", so if that's the case, I'd say yes, this service is taking at least a couple of little steps backwards.
Re:the cloud? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:but... (Score:3, Insightful)
less likely to be wrong.
ROFL, having good karma is all about saying what other Slashdotters will agree with, and absolutely nothing to do with being right.
I have Excellent karma, so I should know... :P
Re:Contacts good, Calendars would be better (Score:3, Insightful)
So Cannonical probably wants a piece of that action. It'll have access to the interconnections between a lot of people skewed toward those in a certain technological niche. Anyway, nothing is free and sometimes you can't even stop others from costing you privacy.