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Ubuntu One Gets iPhone App For Contact Sync
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."
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".
You are welcome on my lawn.
"Always-on" is still substantially a feature of teenagers, girls especially, twitter enthusiasts, and the poor bastards responsible for keeping uptimes up; but I'd say that "always synchronized" is, if anything, an underserved demand.
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).