Windows 7

Posted on Windows 7 News & Tips

One of, certainly my, biggest criticisms of Windows Phone is the inability to synchronise Internet Favourites from your PC or Mac.  When you set up the phone, or indeed have to reset it for whatever reason, you have to use the handset’s fiddly on-screen keyboard to type everything in from scratch.

Now this might not be a problem for some simple domains, but many of us regularly visit websites with complex PHP or ASP code in the URL, or simply have a lot of websites we vitis on a regular basis.

The Mango update to Windows Phone still doesn’t address this problem (though Microsoft have told me they’re aware of, and working on this and other problems).  You’ll be pleased to hear though that, finally Mango does offer a way to get website links from your computer (even a Linux or Android device) onto your Windows Phone.

Some software for Windows Phone does provide favourites sync, but they’re all third-party and work to varying degrees.  I’ve had a look through the marketplace too and couldn’t find any that were free.  There is a free workaround though!  This workaround is the inclusion of SkyDrive support, Microsoft’s cloud storage system.  There’s still no two-way sync, every update has to be done manually, but it is at least one way around the problem.

To get your Internet favourites onto your Windows Phone you need to copy and paste them into a Word or Notepad document and upload it to SkyDrive at www.skydrive.com.  If you don’t use Hotmail you’ll have been asked to create a Windows Live ID when you first went to the Marketplace in your phone.

You will then be able to access your SkyDrive account in the Office hub on the phone and open this document on the handset.  These links will then be clickable (make sure you have http:// at the beginning of each one) and will open in Internet Explorer on the phone when you can then favourite them.

This is you’ll agree, an annoying faff, but it is at least a free option for those people who don’t need to regularly sync Internet favourites with their phone and / or don’t want to have to pay for an app to do it for them.  The only downside is that unless you already have access to a SharePoint server onto which you can upload the file, you’ll have to wait for the Mango update this autumn to get this to work.

Articles like this really serve only one purpose, and this is to demonstrate how stupid it is that simple things get overlooked in software.  We can only hope that Microsoft rectify this, and other problems with Windows Phone, pretty quickly.

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