Nokia Sync

» see sync.nokia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

For most of the 2000s in Turkey, a phone meant a Nokia, the way a kettle is a kettle. And for all those years your contacts lived on the SIM card in a list of a couple of hundred slots, so losing the phone or snapping the card meant losing every number you had collected since school. Nokia Sync existed to solve exactly that.

It launched in 2008 under the Ovi brand, Nokia's attempt at an internet services business, and the mechanism was SyncML, an open synchronization standard that predates almost everything people now mean by the cloud. Your handset talked to a Nokia server and the two of them reconciled your address book and your calendar. Notes came along too. There was no app to install on Series 40, because the sync client was already in the firmware.

Ovi as a whole did not work. Nokia spent years trying to become a services company while its hardware position collapsed underneath it, the brand got retired and folded back into plain Nokia naming around 2011, and Sync was one of the few pieces that kept running afterward under the name Nokia Sync.

~ the case file ~

~ what SyncML was for ~

SyncML is the part worth remembering. An industry consortium ratified it as an open standard, the idea being that any phone could synchronize with any server. In principle you were not locked to Nokia's servers at all. In practice almost nobody ran their own, and what the standard actually delivered was a cheap handset with no app store keeping its address book somewhere safe.

What replaced it was CardDAV and CalDAV, both of which assume a smartphone capable of running a proper client, which a Series 40 handset could not do.

~ the phones it kept alive ~

By the end the supported list was a museum. Series 40 and Symbian made up the bulk of it, and the N9 was in there too, a MeeGo handset Nokia had abandoned three years before it abandoned the sync service. These were devices still in daily use across a lot of the world in 2014, long after the smartphone argument had been settled elsewhere, and Nokia Sync was quietly holding their contact lists.

Microsoft completed its purchase of Nokia's devices and services division in April 2014. Nokia Sync was switched off on 5 December that year.

~ destroyed following termination ~

The closing notice did not soften anything. All data stored in Nokia Sync would be destroyed following termination of the service, and users were given two ways out: export your contacts as a CSV file and import them wherever you liked, or migrate them into a Microsoft account and carry on inside Outlook.com.

Whether many people were still using it by then is a fair question, and the Symbian press at the time asked it out loud. The answer is unknowable now, which is its own kind of ending for a service whose entire job was remembering things on your behalf.

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