It’s an exciting day as we finally get to show you all the new stuff we’ve been working on. Over the last two months you’ve submitted tons of bug and suggestions, however, until we nailed auto-update for the device application we didn’t want to keep putting out new versions, so you haven’t been able to the fixes and improvements. Well finally today, you can.

In total there are over 160 improvements, bug fixes or new features in this release. You can a brief roundup of the most interesting 60 or so on the version history page: VM Version History.

Lets take a look at some of the new features:

New Device Application

Numerous improvements to this. Firstly its not such a memory hog, Shane our device developer suggests your log files should be about 99.9% smaller now. Secondly we’ve made some big changes to the status page where you will now see a:

• Progress Bar
• Last Sync Date
• Device data updates awaiting sync

Here is a comparison screen shot of the old status screen and the new one:

Many of you complained that adding a photos directory was really difficult. We’ve adopted a similar workflow to Sprite Backup now allowing you to browse and add a directory from a tree view of your phones directories.

Because you were reporting too big a battery drain from our old automatic mode we’ve made some changes to the Sync Method options. The old automatic mode just connected to check if there were updates waiting on the server every 5 mins. Not a good solution for your battery life.

Now automatic has been replaced with Scheduled and Manual. If you select “Scheduled” there is a “sync from phone immediately” option which allows you to send phone changes up to your VM account immediately (automatic push down from web to phone is not implemented yet).

The other very exciting new feature is auto-update. Now the application will alert you when a new version is available, and automatically download and install it for you. You’ll still need to update your current version to the new one that contains auto-update, but that’s the last time you’ll have to!

Activity Feed

This is the feature we’re most excited about from this release. The feed shows a chronological timeline of all your phone activity for a certain day, whether it occurred on your phone or from the website.

To stop it getting too noisy we group similar events as you can see in this picture for the calendar events that were updated. It will treat an update for one data type (calls, sms, calendar, photos etc) as one group-able event until it’s interrupted by a different update (making a call instead of sending/receiving SMS with a friend).

You can customise the top of the activity feed and turn off certain data types, jump directly to a previous date and see what you did you on your phone on that day!

The right-hand side of the landing page shows you Upcoming Appointments and total storage space used. At the moment storage is restricted to 2gb shared across all your devices (you can have a maximum of 4 devices in one VM account).

Remote Lock

If you lose your device you can now remotely lock it from the website. This feature will be of most use should you lose your device, where you can use this function to lock down your data. It must be unlocked from the device by entering your VM Username and Password.

SIM Change Alert

A new security feature originally in our Sprite Terminator application, this will lock down your device if a SIM card is inserted that is not on your device approved white list. If anyone tries to put their SIM in and use your device it will lock and present them with the VM Username/Password prompt disabling them from using your device until the correct details are entered.

Important: We’ve changed so much that the old VM device application versions prior to 1.0.2.51 will no longer be able to sync. To continue syncing you must first install 1.0.2.51 from;

Your PC: Download the app

Your Device: http://m.virtualmobile.com

As the application has built in security features now and the ability to lock your phone, make sure you know your VM Username/Password! The only work around should you forget is to hard reset the device.

Now go play, let us know what you think, please continue to submit bugs and give feedback in our Get Satisfaction area.

Have fun!

(Remote wipe and restore didn’t quite make this release but will be in the next one, tentatively scheduled for the 23rd March)