Review of MobileMe

Apple has all but completed the transition from their previous .Mac services to their new replacement, called MobileMe. Loosely defined, MobileMe is a collection of web applications and a system of services for desktop applications that syncs content and user data between systems and devices. For example, it features push email that sends new messages to your various computers, whether they’re PCs or Macs, and to your iPhone or iPod touch. There are some interesting new features also added since .Mac, so I’ll use this rave to talk about those and provide my opinions on the whole service.

Mail

The MobileMe mail application can be accessed through a web application on your internet browser or through your desktop mail application. Also, new messages are pushed to the Mail application on iPhones and iPods, as well as simultaneously sending to your other systems. Apple’s lackluster MobileMe mail service has nothing Gmail lacks, so it’s not worth the money in my opinion.

Calendar & Contacts

Events in your calendar are synced between devices instantaneously, meaning if you add a dinner date on iCal on your Mac, it links automatically to your Calendar application on your iPhone or iPod or to Outlook or Microsoft Calendar on your PC. Contacts work very much the same way, updating changes to your address book across devices instantly. These features would be very convenient for someone touting several Macs and maybe an iPhone or two, but for people like me with one Mac and one (future) iPhone, it seems useless.

Pictures

Pictures taken on your iPhone or found in your iPhoto library can automatically be uploaded to a Web Gallery with one click. The Web Gallery feature is a hand-me-down from .Mac, and in my opinion is pretty lame. The only part of that whole system I’d find sort of cool is uploading pictures taken from an iPhone automatically to a website for friends or family to see, but third-party apps can do that for free, saving me $99 a year.

iDisk

A selling point for most people would be the iDisk, an internet storage solution that can be accessible through any web-enabled computer, Mac or PC. What’s new is that files are shareable through the MobileMe services between accounts, allowing for quick, easy, and—most importantly—secure file sharing and collaboration. The iDisk is wholly unnecessary for how I use my computer, so it didn’t sell me.

Other features have been carried over from .Mac, including website hosting through iWeb, which was a major selling point for me originally. I’ll probably try the 60-day free trial once the iPhone arrives, but the $99 annual tariff is discouraging.¹