Funambol - An Open Source alternative to MobileMe

Sat, Aug 9, 2008

If you’re lucky enough to have grabbed an iPhone 3G, MobileMe would certainly be one of the apps you’d be considering to dirty your hands with, if at all you need the sync-everything-everywhere service. Though you can use it with an iPod, Mac or PC, but having an hands on with it over an iPhone would be sheer fun! For the Indians, the day for iPhone 3G launch is not far!

But for the individuals who would not like to shell out $99 per year for MobileMe, we would advocate trying out a free & open source alternative to MobileMe – Funambol.

Ever since the WWDC keynote, there has been a lot of fuss about Funambol, for it being free and open source.

Funambol is a free & open-source mobile sync software for email, contacts and calendars. It is known to work with Exchange, POP, IMAP and Domino email servers. Funambol hosts its own synchronization servers on myFunambol, which supports MS Outlook, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. One of the greatest feature is that Funambol is based on the SyncML (OMA DS) standard for data synchronization which is built into many mobile phones. This enables Funambol to support over 1.5 billion devices. All for free!

It even works on the jail-broken models of iPhone. Funambol’s jailbroken iPhone app has already been downloaded more than a million times!

Let us see what does Funambol feature:

Funambol provides industry solutions for several types of organizations, including – service providers, OEMs, ISVs, and ODMs and enterprises.
Push email for the mass market.
Mobile backup and PIM synchronization.
Mobile Device Management Framework.
Mobilizing Data & Applications via an Open Source Platform.

One of the key outcomes of this product being open-source is that there is a lot of avenue for other developers from building varied services on the underlying synchronization engine. Keep an eye on the future developments.

Funambol has a huge community of users, so support shall never be an issue. However, if you wish to have dedicated support from the Funambol team, you may purchase support from them.

I would highly recommend trying Funambol, even if you’re in love with mobileme. Do post your feedbacks with this free service.