Coinciding with the introduction of the Windows Mobile 6.5 operating system, Microsoft has upgraded and launched its free phone backup service My Phone – previously in beta – and added a couple of useful premium features to it.

Despite the fact that the official My Phone blog and Twitter account remain silent for the time being, users have definitely taken notice and started tweeting about it.

If you have a Windows Mobile 6 phone, you can use Microsoft My Phone to backup all your data, including your contacts, calendar, photos and more to a password-protected website. When you switch to a new Windows phone, or you lose (data on) your current one, you can head to the website to restore documents, contacts, music, and anything else you synced in just a few clicks.

The website also gives you an easy way to organize your phone photos, or to search your text messages and anything else you synced to the service. In addition, you get an easy starting point for redistributing media to your Windows Live account or other social networks, either from your phone or the web application. All in all, it’s a no-brainer to start using it if you carry a Windows phone. Most newer Windows phones come with the program pre-installed anyway, but you can also download it to your device on the fly right here.

Microsoft does not charge a fee for using My Phone, although it new boasts a couple of Premium Features which require a charge ($4.99). These features are:

- Ring Your Phone: remotely have your device ring (even if it is set to “silent” or “vibrate” mode) so it’s easier for you to retrieve in case you misplaced it
- Locate your phone: in case someone stole your phone and left it on, this feature will enable the GPS receiver on your device and show it on a map
- Lock your Phone: will lock your phone and display a message (e.g. your name and contact information) in case you have lost your phone and a good soul finds it
- Erase your phone: remotely wipe off all data from your phone

All these features are free to trial for 60 days.

Give it a whirl and tell us what you think.

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Lots of negative feedback from our post the other day on Cash4Gold’s amazing growth and profitability. This year, their third year of operations, they are on track to make $160 million in revenue and $50 million or so in profits. All from encouraging people to send in gold jewelry in exchange for cash.

A handful of comments pointed out the very funny Onion spoof on the company where the U.S. government uses Cash4Gold to pay down the national debt. But many of the rest say the company is a scam.

Example: “They offer people significantly less money than their gold is worth and prey on people’s ignorance and desperation. If those profit margins are right, they’re basically stealing from the uninformed. Search online and you’ll find a ton of scam stories about them. It is a very, very shady business…”

Another: “There must be a difference between doing business and stealing from people. I can not believe that this company is still in business. goverment should bring some regulations and monitoring to this industry. due to the recession people are desperate and this company is taking advantage from people. how the owners can sleep at nights. they are taking advantage of people in need of money.”

And: “It appears they are litigious scammers. Running scams is a great way to rake in money.”

Etc.

The chief complaint is that the company offers customers too little money for their gold compared to the spot price at any given time. My understanding is the company aims to pay no more than 50% of the spot price to sellers. The rest, after operational and substantial marketing expense, is profit.

And there is certainly nothing wrong with a company making a profit. They are offering a convenient service to consumers (they send you the prepaid envelope to ship your gold, pay insurance, and ship the gold back to you if you don’t take their offer). If you don’t like what they offer to pay you, use another service. The site even tells you that pawn shops, local jewelers and online services like eBay and Craigslist may fetch you a higher price.

Overall I don’t see any serious ethical issues at all with Cash4Gold, with one exception. If the company is in fact not sending back jewelry promptly to customers who have declined the offer, that needs to be fixed. But hard bargaining and lowballing offers to consumers isn’t evil. It’s just a business decision.

There are no ethical issues here that you don’t see with Google’s business model that generates obscene profits. Or the Windows/Office franchise. Or the exorbitantly priced hot dog vendor at the baseball stadium. Or $30 wifi in a hotel.

I’d personally like to see them make a flat out promise to pay some percentage of the spot price of gold – say 50% or 66%. That way people can have a better idea of what they’ll be offered. Given how many competitors there are in this market, I wouldn’t be surprised for something like that to happen eventually anyway.

But let’s save the “this is evil” comments for the really insidious stuff. Like Jigsaw, who continues to make a killing of the sale of our personal information. Or the Intelius scam we reported on last year where consumers were being automatically signed up to useless credit card subscriptions.

Making obscene profits may make you jealous, but it isn’t evil. There’s a reason so many people are using the Cash4Gold service – it’s easy and convenient. They don’t make promises on their website that they don’t keep, and they aren’t tricking or scamming people. They are simply buying low and selling high, and that’s capitalism at its finest.

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Who said Microsoft's mobile strategy has to be limited to Windows Mobile? Redmond has just announced OneApp, a comprehensive framework for delivering apps on a variety of featurephones -- largely in emerging markets -- where processor horsepower and memory are both at a premium. The solution is deployed in harmony with partners (carriers, primarily) that work to offload app processing and storage into the cloud and keep the on-phone footprint as small as possible (Microsoft is quoting a scant 150K for the OneApp executable itself). At present, OneApp is up and running on South Africa's Blue Label Telecoms where subscribers have access to Windows Live Messenger, Facebook, Twitter, and RSS apps among others; more launches are planned around the world "within the next year" at which point an SDK will be made available to devs who want in. Behind the scenes, the app is based on web standards -- think Palm's webOS -- and is currently compatible with a variety of S60-based Nokias, Sony Ericsson featurephones, and Samsung's U900 Soul. And no, don't worry, this isn't Windows Mobile 7.

Filed under: Cellphones

Microsoft delivers OneApp app framework for featurephones originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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