Microsoft has revealed some details of a forthcoming service that will allow Windows Mobile users to synchronize information between their phone and the Web.

The service, called My Phone, will provide a place to store data such as photos, videos, text messages and calendar items. Users will then be able to share that data with others or use the service as a way to back up information on their phone.

A description of My Phone appeared earlier Friday at getskybox.com, but Microsoft pulled the site after several blogs wrote stories about it. Getskybox.com now redirects to a new URL that has much of the same description.

Getskybox.com went live earlier than planned, and Microsoft will offer more details about My Phone at the Mobile World Congress trade show in mid-February, said a Microsoft spokesman. The service will be available at that time as a limited, invitation-only beta, he said.

Microsoft already has a service that does something similar to My Phone. Live Mesh lets people upload photos and other information to a Web page and access the data from a mobile phone.

But My Phone may be different because it will automatically synch a wide array of information from phones. In addition, while anyone with a phone and a browser can use Live Mesh, My Phone will be limited to people using phones with Windows Mobile 6.

Stop me if you've heard this one: Dell might go into the smartphone business. OOOLLLDDD? But today the WSJ reports Dell's closer than ever, with prototypes built in two different styles and two competing platforms.

The two styles may seem familiar to you, as demonstrated by my totally fake images above. One, we'll call "iPhone," is described by the Wall Street Journal as "a touchscreen but no physical keyboard." The other, which we'll call "Pre," is a "slider-style phone with a keypad and that slides from beneath the screen." Dell is reportedly exploring both Windows Mobile and Android, and has both operating systems running on its prototypes. The WSJ cites those always helpful "people familiar with the matter," and says the formal move into the phone market could happen as early as February, perhaps just in time for the 3GSM global phone biz show in Barcelona on the 15th.

As I so subtly alluded, Dell has been in the smartphone business, or at least rumored to be, for some time. We heard about an impending smartphone in April 2007, then again in December 2007, solidifying last January before being quickly smashed down again. Just two weeks ago, the rumors surfaced again, as analyst extraordinaire Shaw Wu predicted Dell would do the Android secret handshake, publicly, at 3GSM. So the Journal report confirms these rumors, with solid substantiation. (Let's just hope the "people familiar with the matter" don't all turn out to be Shaw Wu wearing wigs and fake moustaches.) As the Journal states, the most likely peg for this happening soon, and reason for the delay up till now, is that Ron Garriques, former head of the cell business at Motorola, can finally build phones for Dell.

He left the burning building in Libertyville Schaumburg, IL for the greener pastures of Round Rock, TX under a noncompete clause that won't lift until...yep...next month. Garriques and his former Moto crony, John Thode—current head of netbooks and cheap PCs at Dell—are probably planning one heck of a comeback. If the combination of Dell and Motorola DNA doesn't render that completely impossible