A new iSync tool is designed to offer a “Mac to mobile” choice for Mac users, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said today in his keynote at Macworld Conference & Expo in New York.
“The iSync is designed to help you sync your digital life,” Jobs said. “We think it’s a groundbreaking application. When you’re not on your Mac, you want to be able to take your info with you whenever you go. Now you can do that.”
iSync is designed to synchronize address books and calendars between Macs and the new generation of Bluetooth-enabled GPRS mobile phones, PalmOS devices and iPods. Jobs also announced that Apple is working with mobile industry leaders Cingular and Sony Ericsson.
“Cell phones are the world’s most popular digital device, but up until now, there’s been almost no cooperation between them and personal computers,” Jobs said. “iSync lets users have the same up-to-date address book and calendars everywhere — on their Mac and in their pocket.”
Sync ensures that address books and calendars flow seamlessly from a user’s Mac to all of their digital devices and back, Jobs said. Rather than requiring a separate synchronization application for each type of device, iSync works with the latest Bluetooth mobile phones, PalmOS devices and iPod to keep all these devices up to date. As a result, iSync users will enjoy seamless mobile access to schedules and other crucial information on all the devices they travel with, Jobs said.
“The new generation of cell phones isn’t your father’s cell phones,” Jobs said. “We think that adding the phone to the digital hub is a really big deal.”
Why would you want iSync? You can enter data on a big display and full-size keyboard and transfer it into your cell phone and not have to fiddle with the tiny buttons on the phone, Jobs said. If you lose your phone, you “don’t lose your life,” he added. And it makes it easy to load data into a new phone if you switch.
Katsumi Ihara, the president of Sony Ericsson, and Stephen Carter, CEO of Cingular Wireless, joined Jobs onstage to praise the iSync application.
“Our products complement each other extremely well,” Ihara said.
What will make all this work is the ability of our three companies to make the complex simple and simple to use, Carter said. “Cingular is thrilled to see Apple take the lead in bringing easy-to-use mobile solutions to market. With a Mac, our customers using the new Sony Ericsson T68i phone are at the leading edge of the mobile services revolution — keeping their contact list and calendar up-to-date between their Mac and their phone, sending and receiving text messages from their Mac, and surfing the Web with our new Wireless Internet Express Network.”
iSync will be available as a free download starting this September and requires Mac OS X version 10.2 (“Jaguar”). A list of iSync-compatible devices is available online.