Apple’s MobileMe: Hot or Not?

If you haven’t been keeping score, Apple has just released its newly revamped group of online services that fall under the name MobileMe. MobileMe replaces the company’s former service “.Mac”. You might be wondering, “What’s up with the name? Why not continue to call it .Mac?” The reason that Apple renamed .Mac MobileMe is because .Mac was primarily a Mac-only service. MobileMe is cross-platform and offers the same benefits and services to Mac and Windows users.
What Does MobileMe Offer?

With MobileMe, you can sync your Contacts, Calendars, and Bookmarks to the web and you get the ability to host your photos and share them in various ways. The service also offers an email address at me.com as well as 20GBs of combined storage for your content.
If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, then the service becomes much more useful as you can have your email, contacts, and calendars pushed out to your device. The idea behind “push” technology is that your device is instantly updated with the new information instead of you having to request it. For example, if an email comes in to the MobileMe server it is instantly sent to your iPhone instead of you having to hit the check mail button or wait for the timed interval for mail to be checked.
Changes or additions can happen from anywhere in the loop and get sent to the other two destinations. For example, let’s say you add a new contact directly to your iPhone. This new contact is then pushed up to MobileMe (the Cloud) and then pushed down to your Mac or PC. At this point the connection coming down from the Cloud to your Mac or PC is not a true “push”. Your Mac or PC can only receive this information every 15 minutes at best. Apple is hoping to make it a true push in a future update.
However, if you edit a calendar entry on the website http://www.me.com, then the information is pushed to your iPhone immediately and pushed to your computer within 15 minutes. The nice thing about this push technology is that you don’t have to plug your iPhone or iPod Touch in as often just to get every little update.

MobileMe—Two Steps Forward, Three Steps Back

I’m OK taking the bad with the good, but in this case there doesn’t seem to be any good reason to have the bad. With .Mac, I already had syncing of contacts, calendars, bookmarks, and other info between computers and the web. With MobileMe I now get that and I get my data pushed out over the air to my iPhone 3G. Great! If I make a change on my Mac (or PC), the change automatically gets synched up to the “Cloud” (MobileMe), where I can view it on the MobileMe website or moments later on my iPhone. If I make a change on the web or on my iPhone, within 15 minutes the change happens on my Mac. Cool! I welcome this kind of wireless connectivity with open arms.
However, as a former .Mac user, I can’t help but wonder why Apple chose to eliminate a couple of things that were already in place. For example, on Monday I went to send a friend of mine an iCard for her birthday. That’s when I realized that iCards didn’t make the cut over to MobileMe. Granted, Apple probably had to license the images for the iCards and, hey, this is an expense that could be cut, but there isn’t even the ability to make an iCard using your own photos anymore. Sure, someone could argue that with Leopard Mail we now have Birthday Stationary and I could use my own image there (which is what I ended up doing two days later), but the point is there was really no reason to eliminate this ability from the website.
The next thing that got lost in the transition is the ability to view your Bookmarks on the MobileMe website. This one is way more puzzling than the loss of iCards because Bookmarks ARE synched up to MobileMe. So, why not offer the ability to see them and use them on the MobileMe website? This was a very handy feature of .Mac. It saved my butt on more than one occasion. I remember being in my eye doctor’s office and telling him about a site that sold prescription swim goggles. I couldn’t remember the URL so I asked if I could use his PC. I logged on to .Mac via his IE browser. I brought up my bookmarks and went straight to the site. Perfect! Yeah, I know, I could now just bring up the site on my iPhone, but if the bookmarks are already in the Cloud, why not offer the ability to see them?

Calendars, Calendars, Calendars!

Besides missing a couple of .Mac features, there are some other fundamental problems I have with MobileMe and they revolve around calendars. It’s great to finally be able to see my iCals on the web without having to “publish” them. It’s also great to have them pushed out to my iPhone. However, what I want is more choices! As it stands right now, when you turn on syncing for iCal calendars to MobileMe, it’s an all or nothing proposition. I have a couple miscellaneous iCals that I DON’T need synched up to the “Cloud” or to my iPhone. More importantly, there are family member, holiday, and non-profit organization calendars that I subscribe to that I DO want on my iPhone.
As it stands today, subscribed iCals can NOT be synched to MobileMe and therefore are NOT pushed out to your iPhone. It even treats the built-in “Birthdays” iCal as a Subscribed calendar and therefore you don’t get your birthdays on your iPhone! The only way around this is to NOT use MobileMe for your iCals. However, then you lose the ability to have your calendars pushed out automatically and the only updates you would get would be when you physically connected your USB cable and performed a sync (a step backwards).
Also, if you have a corporate Exchange account configured for your work calendar (which I do), you lose the ability to sync your iCals via iTunes/USB, so you have no choice but to use MobileMe if you want to keep your personal appointments separate. The service is too much about “me” at this point.
With your MobileMe service, you also get online storage for files and backup. You can access these files anywhere you are on the ‘Net from either a Mac or PC via the web or the built-in OS support on the Mac for the iDisk. However, there doesn’t appear to be a way to view files from your iDisk via your iPhone. For example, the iDisk would be a great place to store sensitive data that you don’t want on your actual devices. You could log in to your MobileMe account with your password via the Safari browser. It would be great to then be able to view PDFs and other compatible files via your iPhone.
MobileMe is a good tool and I have no problem recommending it to users with basic needs. However, if you have lots of calendars or a complicated setup, you may want to wait until Apple works out some of these issues.
MobileMe goes for $99/year ($149/year for the Family Pack).

Article Written By:
Terry White, technical resources manager for Adobe Systems Inc, leads a team of applications engineers that focus on professional publishing, Web authoring, and digital video. Terry has been active in the industry for over 18 years and is the founder and president of MacGroup-Detroit, Michigan's largest Macintosh users group. He is co-author of the InDesign CS Killer Tips book and a columnist for Mac Design magazine. He says, "TiVo has forever changed the way I watch television. With TiVo, theres always something on!"

Original Article: Located here at Peachpit