New Features For Windows Phone 7New Features For Windows Phone 7

Everyone with a Windows Phone 7 device is expecting a pretty big update in the next few weeks that will add copy and paste among other things. Even more functionality is on the way, but not on the device itself. Rather, MS is adding more online and cloud support.Fans of Windows Home Server will be happy to know that the team working on the current version of WHS code named "Vail" announced a program for the phone that add the "My Server" feature. It does require that you are running "Vail" so those that are boycotting Vail due to is lack of Drive Extender technology in earlier versions of WHS will have to decide between Drive Extender and this new Windows Phone 7 app.

You can access the alerts on WHS just as you would from the dashboard, as well as try to resolve any issues. The kicker for most though will be access to your media library. You can stream music, video and photos from your server to your phone. That can be handy if you want to show off some photos that you haven't stored on your phone or listen to some old music that isn't in your local library. You can also upload photos from your phone directly to your server so they are backed up. When you open a photo, options like Upload to Facebook will be accompanied by Upload to My Server.

Just because the Kin is dead doesn't mean the whole project was a failure. There was a lot of praise for the Kin Studio. It was a backup service that took virtually everything created on the Kin phone and backed it up to your online account where you could access it from any browser. Photos, texts, videos, call history and more were all replicated to your cloud account.

That is similar to the My Phone service Microsoft launched about two years ago for Windows Mobile 6.x devices. My Phone backed up all of the above in addition to documents. It also had location services built in that would allow you to find your phone if you lost it. Microsoft killed all of that except the location services when Windows Phone 7 was released. It looks like they will be slowly adding back some of those features in the coming months.