MobileMe
A few months ago, Apple had relaunched it’s .Mac service as a MobileMe and has graciously christened it “Exchange for the rest of us”. The idea is getting enterprise-like Exchange features without going through the work and expense of setting it up and managing it! I signed-up for a trial account and would like to post my thoughts about it and to help anyone considering to sign-up for this service to determine whether or not they would really want to get it. First off, I would like to say anyone who knows me well or has read my copious amounts of Apple-related blogs, knows me as a Bona Fide Apple Fanboy and this review will totally go against that although, this is not intentional, I am writing this post to save people from signing up for a service that they might regret spending their money on. With that said, I will go ahead and write my thoughts on Apple’s Mobile Me Service.
I would like to list the service you would get if you decide to sign-up for Mobile Me:
- Web Storage- You get 20 GB of storage which is good for backing up files and sharing media or hosting a website. However, you can sign up for Amazon S3 account and pay just $3/Month or $0.15 per Gigabyte and you can expand that and not get cut off at 20 GB making it a much more useful service.
- Mail- You get a 5 GB email account with the username of your choice @me.com. The exchange part of this service is that the email pushes to all your devices like your iPhone, iPod Touch, computer mail client, and webmail. I will write further on this “Push” service and it’s reliability.
- Address Book- You also have a Push address book where you can add contacts from anywhere and it “Instantly” synchronizes with all your devices.
- Calendar- It also synchronizes your events calendar with all your devices as well “instantly”.
- Photo Gallery- Share your photos online once again, you could get free flickr or if you want unlimited picture uploads, get Flickr Pro for $25/Years!
- Iweb- A service that allows Mac users to use iWeb of the iLife Suite and publish websites with ease. Once again, using a higher quality web service like my amazing host 1and1 which is a much more professional host and allows the developer to do virtually anything with plans starting for only $3/month.
In concept, MobileMe is a great concept cloud computing solution however, the “Push” services are some what unreliable and have given early adopters issues. I also have tried to use their web applications and they are extremely slow in comparison to Google’s apps, which are FREE, and is ridiculous in my opinion to pay for web apps which I live in daily that are slow and lagging. I also think that to be a complete web suite it needs a task list application like Remember the Milk with sync capabilities that actually works. If a service doesn’t work 99.9% of the time, then it is not worth paying the service fee. I do believe that in a few months, Apple will finally kick out all the bugs and make it a good Cloud Computing service but, I think that most of it’s services can be obtained for either free or for a smaller fee. In fact, I will write a blog post later this week on how to save the $99/Year from MobileMe and I expect a cut of the savings! So, check Gdovin.net everyday this week to find that post. Until then, reconsider getting Mobileme it is not worth the price especially since I will be writing a post about how to get the services for much less in a few days!
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