I recently watched a podcast (embedded below) about syncing a phone’s contacts with Google contacts. It reminded me of what happens to people who:
- rely on their phones exclusively for contact information for hundreds, if not thousands, of people
- don’t back up their phones to their computers
- don’t synchronize their phone’s data to the cloud
- lose their phones
As you might imagine, the result of step 4 usually involves groaning – and that’s about the best aspect of the experience.
There’s no reason for the groaning. Sure, losing or destroying a phone or a tablet is a pain, but it’s just hardware. You can easily replace hardware.
The information, on the other hand, can take forever to replace – if you even have it anywhere else.
That’s why phone makers and other companies, like Google, let you store your contacts (and calendars, and task lists, and so forth) on their servers. Take advantage of such offerings. If you do, getting a new phone won’t involve the tedious job of reentering your information. Just link to the service that contains your data. The data flows down from the cloud to your new handset.
That podcast I mentioned at the beginning of this post? Here it is. You can find similar instructions online to sync your phone to the online service of your choice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_UcqRDNqcY