Microsoft has opened the beta of its My Phone cloud-based synchronization service to the public, giving the masses a chance to test drive Microsoft's counterpart to Apple's MobileMe service. The free My Phone service lets users back up their smartphone data to up to 200 megabytes of storage space on a Microsoft-hosted Web site, and makes this information accessible through a Web browser. The idea is to give smartphone users an easy way to restore data to a lost or stolen device, or to quickly migrate data from an old device to a new one.