Those of  us familiar with the MobileMe service are well acquainted with the frustrations and joys of working with that syncing service. At the moment it looks like Microsoft is trying to take advantage of some of the frustrated users who are looking for simple mobile/computer syncing services by releasing their service My Phone.

The My Phone service which is scheduled to launch later this year will come in two versions. One, being a free version with ads and then the other being premium service which one will have to subscribe to. The service is going to be designed to function with Windows Mobile devices such as the HTC line and will offer a number of syncing features. This includes the standard features such as contacts, calendar dates and so on. All features that are offered by  Apple’s MobileMe, the choice service for all Apple iPhone 3G users. Where it differs is that it plans to offer over the air syncing for multimedia files as well. Allowing you to store images, MP3s and video clips to a My Phone server and then have the files sync either to your computer or to your phone. One of the disadvantages of this is that currently My Phone is only allowing for this syncing to be done over your regular data connection. There are currently no plans to allow it on Wi-Fi connections.

In addition to the syncing features, one of the main advantages of the My Phone service is the ability to sync up multiple phones to your one service. This means if you are in the middle of changing phones, transferring all of your personal information will only be a matter of signing in with your correct ID and automatically syncing your phone with your information on the My Phone server.

All of these features are lacking in MobileMe or are not accessible with such ease.

While it does excel in allowing one to do over the air syncing with multimedia files, My Phone is still a little bit behind the MobileMe service in e-mail. At the moment there are no plans for e-mail integration which would allow e-mail to be accessed by both your home computer and mobile device.

The service appears to be strong, but as we know we can’t judge these things until they’ve actually come into public use. But the prospect of using a free service for syncing as opposed to the subscription service of MobileMe is an attractive one.

What do you think? Is this going to affect your future mobile purchases?