Chrync syncs your Chrome bookmarks to Lumia

The design documents for Windows Phone say you should ‘avoid chrome’ when it comes to user-interface design on the platform. That may be so, but there’s one piece of Chrome that I very much welcome on my Nokia Lumia 800, and that’s the bookmarks from my Chrome desktop browser. New app Chrync performs this synchronisation and more.
Naturally, you need to have the Chrome browser on another computer, a connected account and a collection of bookmarks for this app to be any use. (Although, if your preference is for a different browser, you could download Chrome simply to import the bookmarks from your favoured browser).

Let’s assume you’ve managed to overcome this hurdle.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the app, simply enter your Google account credentials on the opening screen. Give it a minute or two, and you’ve got all your desktop bookmarks on your phone.

Not just those, but also any passwords you’ve stored, open tabs and your ‘Omnibox’ history. You can exclude any of these if you wish – you might decide having account passwords on your mobile phone isn’t a great idea, for example, particularly if you don’t use a PIN code to lock the device.

This is really very useful. Typing long internet addresses is painful on any mobile phone, with zero-tolerance for typos. Any way to get all the site addresses you need without effort is enormously welcome.

Chrync maintains its own list of synchronised bookmarks, rather than merging them into the ones you have in Internet Explorer. At first, this seemed like an unfortunate decision, and that it would be better to have all your bookmarks in one place.

However, the separation has its merits, too. There are a number of sites that I only visit from my phone – such as the mobile versions of news and magazine sites. Having those frequently used sites in a separate place to the 100+ bookmarks I’ve got from my desktop machine keeps the Internet Explorer list lean and functional.

There’s really very little else to say about Chrync: it does one important job really well and without fuss. The app costs just 0.79p/0.99c on the Marketplace and a free trial is available.