A lot of contacts, documents, text messages, games, and other data live on your smartphone, but manufacturers and service carriers aren’t going out of their way to make backing up easy. Gizmodo, however, has you covered on nearly any platform.
John Herrman runs down the best, easiest, and cheapest methods for backing up iPhones, Android units, BlackBerries, Windows Mobile, and Palm smartphones. Some involve backing up right to your computer’s hard drive (which you can then back up to an online service or elsewhere), while others drop your data onto SD cards or onto free or cheap web cloud storage space. Not every platform supports every kind of data backup, but most allow you to put enough aside that a lost, stolen, or memory-wiped phone wouldn’t cost you a whole day’s worth of re-configuring.
Hit the link for Gizmodo’s full guide. Got a better solution not mentioned there or around here? Tell us about it in the comments.
iPhone/Android/Windows Mobile: Waze turns your GPS-enabled phone into a node in a network of real-time traffic reporters. As you use Waze, you build maps, get traffic data, and alert other commuters to events on the road.
Windows Mobile/Symbian/BlackBerry/Android: If you’ve got an itch to flee your smartphone for another platform entirely, the prospect of manually dragging over your data is daunting. Sprite Migrate, a free transfer application, makes it easy to transfer pretty much everything.