Green Bay, WI - Cell phones have gone beyond making calls and frequently serve as storage units for valuable information, from important contacts, priceless pictures, favorite songs and videos from special moments in life. So a lost, stolen or damaged phone causes not only a loss of connectivity, but also a loss of invaluable content. Fortunately, most devices offer some form of content back-up.

With smart phones, each operating system offers a different form of content back-up. These types of devices synchronize with email programs, making contact and calendar information secure within the computer-based email program. Many major smart phone manufacturers provide software with the device:

• -Research In Motion (RIM) provides the BlackBerry Desktop Manager free with all their devices, which will backup all content on the device.
• -Android can vary from device to device, but contacts and calendar will always be backed up on Gmail, as well as the email server. With Cellcom’s HTC Hero, HTC provides software called HTC Sync which will backup all content – contacts and media.
• -WindowsMobile devices use an application called MyPhone, which is a free web-based application that is downloaded from Windows Marketplace and will backup all content.

It’s less well-known that most standard handsets offer content back-up solutions through BREW. BREW is an application development platform that works across many devices and offers users numerous content back-up options:

• -CelleSync costs $1.99/month or $6.99 for the life of the phone. After downloading this application, users set up a username and password and sync their phone contents with an online storage space.
• -CellBackUp costs $1.99/month or $11.29 for the life of the phone. Similar to CelleSync, this application also allows a user to sync their phone contents to an online storage space. An added feature of CellBackUp is the ability to manage contacts for a group, which can be beneficial for businesses who share a phone list.

To manage costs, Cellcom recommends a data plan for BREW-based solutions. People with unlimited data can upload and download as much content as they want; those without data get charged per kilobyte (KB). To download the information onto a new device, the BREW app must be redownloaded to the phone. When selecting a new device, check with your salesperson to make sure it is compatible with the application used to back-up a previous device.