Funambol: Open-Source alternative for MobileMe
With the iPhone 3G being announced at the beginning of this week, I have been browsing alot of iphone website and blogs to inform myself of the possibilities of the device since I might buy one once it will be released.
MobileMe, the service announced by Steve Jobs announched for syncing email, contacts, calendar and photo’s across multime devices also looked interesting to me, but the downside is that this service will not be provided for free.
Since Google already offers email, contacts and a calendar online I was hoping that Google would have already announced a similar service (but for free 
), but unfortunately, this is not (yet) the case.
On my seach to a similar service I did find a similar service named Funambol. This service lets you synchronise email, contacts and a calendar. The only feature not offered by Funambol is the synchronisation of pictures. But since Funambol is an open source project, we will probably will see this feature added in the future.
It is possible to download the software, and setup a server yourself locally, or you can use the online service available at http://my.funambol.com
Software packages able to sync with the service:
- PocketPC: Push emails, synchronise contacts, calendar, tasks, notes
- SmartPhone: Push emails, synchronise contacts, calendar, tasks, notes
- Blackberry: Push emails, synchronise PIM’s
- iPod: Synchronize Contacts and Calendar
- Outlook: Synchronize Contacts and Calendar
- Thunderbird: Synchronize Contacts
- iPhone: Push emails, synchronise contacts, calendar
The server software is both available for the Windows and Linux operating systems. Some other interesting project developed by the supporting community:
- Funambol Exchange Connector v6.5
- Funambol Domino Connector v3
- Funambol Palm PIM Client
- Funambol Google Android Push Email and PIM Client
- Funambol Palm PIM Client
- Funambol Gmail PIM Plug-in
- Plaxo Windows Mobile Contact Sync Plug-in
Check out this page for more addons for Funambol: https://www.forge.funambol.org/download/
I am testing the service right now and so far it looks very promising. I installed the PocketPC client on my HTC PocketPC and configured my gmail account via the MyFunambol online service, so now I get Push-email from the MyFunambol service towards my PocketPC and my PocketPC contacts and calendar are automatically syncing with the MyFunambol server.
I also tested the Mozilla Thunderbird and added the Funambol extention. With this service you can sync your thunderbird contacts with the MyFunambol service.
Funambol Downloads:
Standard clients & server download: https://www.forge.funambol.org/download/
myFunambol online server: http://my.funambol.com
Other community projects: https://www.forge.funambol.org/participate/projects.html
For other SyncML synchronisation solutions checkout the SyncML Wikipedia page
