Microsoft’s new My Phone service was recently announced at Mobile World Congress and we’re going to take you through a look at how it works in the video below. The service is really intended as a backup for when you might get a new phone or lose your phone so that you’ll still have all your information. It’s tied to your Windows Live ID so when you sign up for the service it will ask for your LiveID and then when you install the software on your Windows Phone, you’ll also have to log in with your Live ID.

The service offers very basic PIM editing capabilities as well as photo, video, and document upload capabilities which all get synced to the phones that you have paired with your account. This is great for syncing content with multiple phones, especially in the case of text messages. If you decide to switch phones everyday and they’re all synced with My Phone, you’ll have the same threads of text messages available on each phone. That’s one of the best features of this service in my opinion.

Some interesting notes:

- Contact photos do sync and are backed up just fine.

- Contacts, Calander, and Tasks are not backed up if you have any Exchange account defined in ActiveSync. Even if you are NOT syncing the Contacts/Calendar/Tasks with Exchange, they will still not back up. You have to remove the Exchange account completely in order to use the Contacts/Calendar/Tasks syncing.

- Contacts/Calendar/Tasks do sync if you are also syncing with a stand-alone Outlook installation via ActiveSync

- An Archive to Web feature will let you remove content from your phone, while allowing it to stay in your My Phone account so as you don’t lose it completely.

- Email does not appear to be backed up. I would hope at least email account settings could be backed up in the future.

- Internet Explorer Favorites are not backed up.

- Notes are not not backed up.

- While LiveMesh and Exchange syncing can do most of what this does already, My Phone is the first easy method of syncing text messages between multiple phones.