Funambol today announced the world's first open source mobile sync app for the Android G1 phone from T-Mobile USA. The Funambol Android Client syncs contacts from a Google gPhone with a Funambol Server. Funambol Android Client provides an open source Mobile'We' capability for gPhones to make it easy for users to sync and share contacts from other mobile phones as well as from popular desktop apps such as MS Outlook and webmail such as Yahoo!, Gmail and AOL. The software was developed by the Funambol community, which demonstrates the speed at which an open source development model can support the latest mobile handsets versus proprietary approaches.

Funambol today announced the release of a new position paper entitled, "Open MobileWe for the Rest of Us". The paper discusses how Apple's new MobileMe service has greatly publicized the utility of mobile sync for mass market users and illustrates that large numbers of people are willing to pay for sync. At the same time, MobileMe's initial teething problems demonstrated that while mobile sync may look easy, in reality, it is not. The paper describes how mobile operators, service providers, portals and device manufacturers have a new imperative and major opportunity to differentiate their offerings by enabling users to sync a wide range of mobile content, including PIM data (contacts, calendars, tasks and notes), push email, photos, files and other content. The paper notes that the keys are broad device compatibility enabled by open source and standards, as well as ease-of-use and service packaging.

Funambol, the open source mobile device synchronization and push email provider, released version 7.0 of its server and client software in August. We took a look at what it offers, then took it for a test drive on mobile devices and the Linux desktop.

Excerpt: Personally, I dislike activesync a lot. I regularly had syncing problems with it, occasionally I got messages indicating I had to start a new partnership, etc. but when it worked, it did work nicely, just not consistently. After months and months of searching I've found something that totally replaces activesync for me and, for my situation works exceedingly well thus far.