It’s no secret that I’ve been disappointed with Ovi Contacts since it was first launched. The service, which allows you to store an online backup of your phone’s address book, is able to synchronize with your handset via SyncML, though no Nokia device currently offers the ability to automate the synchronization process without a third party app, such as the awesomely simple Swim. Recently, Nokia revealed that Ovi Mail is the first Ovi service to integrate with Ovi Contacts, allowing you to access a single address book between the two services – hopefully we’ll see more of this in the other Ovi services, soon.
In any case, Ovi Contacts recently got a new backend, which you can check out in beta at http://contactsui.ovi.com – beware, this is a new beta version, but it *does* use your real data, so if you’re happy using the current version of Ovi Contacts, you may want to sit this one out. If you’re like me, though, and have yet to get Ovi Contacts to work reliably, then by all means, play away.
On a side note, after over a year of trying to get ahold of someone on the Ovi Contacts team to check out my account, I was finally able to get someone to look into it, and they confirmed it’s incredibly messed up. The team is looking into it, and hope to have a fix put in place by the end of this month. I’m pumped to finally (hopefully) be able to really give it a shot, though Google is currently doing an awesome job of handling this for me, at the present time.
What are you using for your contacts backup? Are you still backing up locally with Microsoft Outlook, or have you, too, gone to the cloud with Google or Ovi?
