Dashwire - sync your smartphone’s media, messages, and more over the air
A few weeks back while spending some time with the good folks at Microsoft, I had the chance to talk with Ford Davidson of Dashwire, a new company that creates software for smartphones that synchornizes all sorts of your phone’s media and messages and other information to a central website where it can be accessed easily from a desktop computer. Better yet, it does this all over the air and in the background - you don’t have to do anything once the client is installed and setup.
I have the current Dashwire client loaded on my HTC X7510 Advantage, which I reviewed recently. I created a Dashwire.com account and then configured the Dashwire client to use my login information. From that point forward, Dashwire just does its thing.
In particular, its “thing” at this time consists of syncing photos, videos, contacts, bookmarks, call log, speed dials, and text messages. Additionally, Dashwire also lets you chose your phone’s ringtone and will integrate with Callwave’s Visual Voicemail system, which converts your voicemail messages into text that you can read on your phone.
So when the client is running on your phone, which is pretty much all the time, since it auto-loads, if you take a photo with your phone, it will just show up on the Dashwire.com site in your private, and secure, home page. It might take a minute or two, depending on the resolution of the camera and the speed of your data connection, but it will show up soon enough. Once on Dashwire, you are a painless mouse click or two away from having the photo posted on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Friendfeed, or bebo.
The Dashwire system is equally useful for text messaging. Seconds after you receive a message on your phone, you will see it on the website. Better yet, you can actually reply to the message from the website (with an IM-like threaded SMS view), and your response will sync to the phone and be sent from your phone as if you had typed it in directly. That’s fantastic.
Overall, it is just a damn handy application to have. Even if you don’t care much about photos or text messages, it is still a great way to edit or create new contacts or bookmarks for your phone. Dashwire even lets you choose from a large catalog of pre-done bookmarks. It is a heck of a lot easier to do such tasks from a PC than from a smartphone.
So what does the future hold for Dashwire? Plenty, it seems. For starters, the company is working on a new version of the client, which I have already seen, that makes the Dashwire client two-way, letting you control more sharing options, status settings, and other things that could previously only be done through the website. That client should be out very soon.
On top of that, a version of Dashwire for S60 3rd edition is being worked on for a Fall release. It will offer all of hte same two-way functionality that the new Windows Mobile client does. The next platform that Dashwire is going to target is BlackBerry, but we don’t have an ETA on that yet.
Other new features are also planned, such email account configuration, and Dashwire is mulling over calendar synchronization as well.
Lots of good stuff, and certainly worth trying out considering the price, which is free….
Head on over to Dashwire.com to download the client and create your own account.
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I really like the media features; they are so quick and seamless. This makes me think, how long before you’ll be able to take a picture with your DSLR and have it uploaded to the internet seconds later? That’d be sweet.
Regardless, this rocks for now.
You can actually do that already with an Eye-Fi card, it is an SD card with WiFi in it. It will upload photos as soon as they are saved to the card - as long as WiFi is available.