Virgin introduces backup plan for contacts lists

Thankfully, transferring your contacts from one phone to another has become remarkably easier since cell phones first hit the mainstream. For the most part, you can take your old and new phone to an authorized dealer, and it’ll take them 10 minutes, if that, to transfer your contacts. Unfortunately, it’s not always this easy. For instance, when we got a new phone, we asked our dealer to transfer numbers. They said that because I had an old phone, they could do it for a $10 fee — which means some dude sits in the back and types the numbers from our old phone into our new one. And what if you broke or lost your phone? Then you’re really SOL. But Virgin Mobile has your back. This week, they released the “Contact Vault,” which stores the contents of your phone online. All you have to do is download a program to your phone, and you’re all synced up. You can set it to sync daily, weekly, or monthly, so you’ll always have a backup of your contacts online. This is only available on the Switch Back and Cyclops phones, but that’s sure to expand as Virgin adds more phones to its arsenal. The best feature, to us, is the “kill feature.” If your phone is lost or stolen, you can log onto your account online and have the phone completely wiped, so no one can get to your personal information. Since everything is stored online, you can put all that information back on your new phone with ease. The only problem: it costs $1.99 per month. We’re not sure how to feel about this. Yes, this is the kind of service you can charge for, but we were thinking more along the lines of a buck a month. Then again, we have no idea how much it will cost to host this information on the web, so we’ll reserve judgement. Still, it’s an excellent idea by Virgin, and we expect it to pay off down the road. [PR Newswire]]>