On Mon, 2013-03-04 at 09:40 +0000, Graham Cobb wrote: > On Monday 04 March 2013 08:43:01 Patrick Ohly wrote: > > > It is great to be able to (from a users perspective: finally) > > > synchronize SyncML phones with pim-data from the linux desktop in a > > > stable an quick way. > > > > One could also say "too late", because new phones are less and less > > likely to support SyncML. But it's good to hear that you got some value > > out of it :-) > > Interesting comment, Patrick. What is your view of how PIM syncing is > evolving with new phones? Certainly they are supporting a more and more > functional ActiveSync for the enterprise market but what about personal users?
Personal usage as in "data is stored only on hardware owned by the user" no longer seems to be a priority, if it is supported at all. Some phone vendors still offer a Windows companion program for direct syncing with Outlook, but that no longer seems to be based on open standards. There might be SyncML underneath, but how to establish a session is unknown. That trend started with syncing via USB and continued with syncing via WLAN. > Will it all become specific apps for specific cloud services? For example, > the > Dropbox apps for phones, PCs, etc will sync your contacts/calendar on that > device to Dropbox? Facebook, Evernote, etc will have similar apps? And so > will mobile phone operators? That is starting to happen already. Yeah, probably something like that. It shifts work away from the phone vendor to the service provider. Large service providers can afford to write and maintain such apps, smaller ones can't. The place where I see SyncML hanging on is with mobile phone operators. They insist that phone vendors provide SyncML because that is what the operator has running on the server side. > I suppose we will then need to wait for the Facebook generation to become old > and cynical before they will push for open interfaces so that they can easily > switch service providers. Right. History repeating... > In the meantime, would it be feasible to create SyncML apps for Andorid, > iPhone, etc to continue to support open syncing? Yes, of course. This is what Synthesis (http://synthesis.ch/) do for Android and plan44 (http://www.plan44.ch/syncmlios.php) for iPhone. They don't support syncing via Bluetooth (probably a combination of lack of motivation and lacking platform APIs), but one can do what Christof did and set up SyncEvolution as a private SyncML server to use these apps. SyncEvolution is using the same SyncML engine as these products. Because it is a lot of work, no-one is doing it as pure open source apps. I have no intention of porting SyncEvolution for that reason, and also because it doesn't seem fair to eat the lunch of the people who made SyncEvolution in is current incarnation possible in the first place. Funambol used to provide more or less open source clients; as discussed here on the list already, they no longer see PIM syncing as part of their business. -- Best Regards, Patrick Ohly The content of this message is my personal opinion only and although I am an employee of Intel, the statements I make here in no way represent Intel's position on the issue, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of Intel on this matter. _______________________________________________ SyncEvolution mailing list [email protected] http://lists.syncevolution.org/listinfo/syncevolution
