There are many services out there that offer you cloud based PIM+ (plus email, photos, storage, etc.) Some are free, some are for pay. I think that 2009 will be the year that we see more competition for consumer mindshare.

Yahoo has been in the game for quite some time. They've got Yahoo Mail, which has free 'push' to Apple's iPhone/iPod touch platform (last I checked anyway). They've got an OK addressbook, calendar, notebook, and photo management through Flickr. The problem is that they haven't put it all together. They do have Yahoo! Go but results do vary from smartphone to smartphone and it's not available for all platforms.

Google provides superior email service (in my experience) and their calendar is pretty useful - although lack of iCal sync (for free) makes it less useful for me. Their addressbook stinks - big time! I really wish they would fix it. They too have photo management through picassa. The one problem with the google verse is that is only available on Android devices -although I guess separate apps could be available on other platforms.

MobileMe is Apple's paid service (and sometimes I feel like a sucker for using it, but I can use my nokia phone and my ipod, and my mac to use it, so I guess it's valuable).

Ovi is Nokia's platform for all things PIM+ - haven't used it much, and the sync times out on my Nokia N80, so I guess I won't be fully using it until I get a new S60 phone.

Finally Microsoft has announced SkyBox, it's own version of PIM+ that is set to be unveiled sometime this month.

There is of course the Danger sidekick PIM+, but I am not sure if this is sticking around for very long (I think it would be better to integrate it with SkyBox...but what do I know?)

The one problem I've got with all of these services is that they don't play nice with one another. On my Mac I can sync my contact data with Google and Yahoo. Awesome! What about my ToDo and Calendar? What about an Ovi plug in? I don't mind having a different cloud provider for my PIM data, however it's imperative for this data to be interoperable with each other.

So what will happen in 2009? I think we will probably see an improvement of services in order to gain mindshare. I don't think we will see much cross-sync compatibility - as much as I would love to see this happen.