Exclusive Hands On with Best Buy’s mIQ Mobile Backup Service

Recently, Best Buy introduced its new mobile backup solution powered by Dashwire’s DASHWORKS: mIQ.

The service, which will officially be available on October 12th, is free and can be accessed by any smart phone owner, whether you bought the phone at Best Buy or not. We’ve been playing with mIQ for a few hours now and are impressed with what we see so far.

mIQ will allow smart phone owners (BlackBerry, Symbian S60, and Windows Mobile operating systems are supported at this time) to upload all of their contacts, messages, photos, videos, and more to the Web. Sound similar to Microsoft’s My Phone? That’s because it is: but it’s not just for Windows Mobile users.

To get started, we simply had to sign up for an account and then download the respective client. We installed mIQ on our Windows Mobile 6.5 HTC Imagio in under 30 seconds. Then it began automatically syncing with the server online. The system uploaded all eleven of our photos, and a single video, in about three minutes over an EV-DO Rev. A 3G network.

Read on for more analysis and our gallery of photos.

Next, we logged in to m.miqlive.com and suddenly all of the information about our phone was available for us to see. We could view how much memory was used on our memory card, our photos and videos in a neat thumbnail lineup, and even our contacts. There’s also a list of recent message conversations and calls.

But what makes this more than just a backup solution is that you can actually add events to your calendar, send text messages, manage contacts, and more. There’s also a social aspect: You can share your videos and photos with a host of sites  including Facebook, Flickr, Friend Feed, and Twitter. Oddly, there’s no option to send videos directly to YouTube at this time.

The service is supported by advertisements. Along the left navigation bar and at the bottom of the page there are ads for phone accessories, skins, batteries, and more. If you click an ad, you’re directed to Best Buy’s Web site where you can make a purchase.

Overall we’re excited for the service and how far the original Dashwire software has become, and since it’s free, recommend you check it out yourselves on October 12th.