My i-mate Ultimate 9502 decided to have a really bad day today and pretend it didn’t have a touch screen or any buttons.

After searching the web and finally calling i-mate support (which was pretty quick and painless – amazingly), I had to perform a hard reset.
This restores the device to original factory state wiping and user data.

Now this is not such a big issue as most of my data is stored on the micro-SD card within the phone, and contacts, email, calendar & tasks all sync to Exchange over the air.
The outstanding items are SMS & MMS messages & any photos and videos inadvertently stored on the inbuilt storage.

Luckily I have been trying out the Microsoft My Phone beta service.
Well I had been till I uninstalled it from the device (but not closed the account) a month ago.

The My Phone service is basically just a backup service for your Windows Mobile based device.

So, it’s time to put My Phone to the test.
In theory I should be able to restore any SMS’s I really want along with anything else.

I’ll also try and set activesync up again without plugging it into my PC.

I guess after this, I might re-enable My Phone on the device as next time the memory card might fail or the phone might be stolen.
At least then I can restore SMS along with the contents of the memory card.

The other option would be to backup the phone to my PC more often..