JulianSchrader.de

MobileMe

iPhone 3G was introduced about three weeks ago and I’m still waiting to receive my new device, which I had preordered as soon as it was possible. Well, T-Mobile chose to sell their units to new subscribers.

But wait, something else also started about three weeks ago:

MobileMe keeps all of your information in an online server, or “cloud.” So no matter where you go or what device you use, everything is in sync. And you can manage it all from anywhere using rich web applications at me.com.

I use MobileMe to keep my e-mail, address book and calendar in sync between my MacBook Pro and my iPhone — and I have access to all of this, photos and files whereever I can use a PC or Mac with a modern web browser and internet access.

Let’s jump right in and take a look at the features!

Mail: If you’re familiar with Apple’s Mail.app (comes with every Mac), you’ll feel at home with MobileMe’s “mail application”. Easy-to-use and well thought-out functions include a handy way to reply to incoming mails quickly without having to load every single one entirely (Quick Reply) and a clearly arranged interface which helps to come to the point when dealing with your e-mail.

Contacts: It’s just the same. Mac users know exactly how to handle this web application — it feels just the same as Address Book.app on your Mac.

An intuitive interface helps managing your contacts — you can arrange them in groups, create, edit and delete single contacts or import and export vCards from within the web interface.

Calendar: One more time, especially Mac users feel at home. Although MobileMe also syncs with PCs (for example Outlook’s calendar), MobileMe’s calendar application looks and feels just like iCal on every Mac. Click and drag to create a new event or move appointments to another time slot just like your used to do it.

Gallery: You already guessed it. There’s an application on your Mac as well — iPhoto.

Whereas iPhoto is an application which enables you to organise and edit photos, MobileMe’s Gallery feature doesn’t do pretty much on first sight: It displays the albums you chose to share from within iPhoto.

But wait, there’s more: If you want to share photos without having access to your Mac at home, you can create albums and upload pictures directly from MobileMe’s web interface.

iDisk: Just like the old .Mac-iDisk, this is the place to upload, store, sync and share files. Documents, images, movies and whatever you choose to drop onto your iDisk are synchronized to MobileMe. This allows for access to your important files whereever there is a computer with internet access.

Account: For security reasons, you have to enter your password a second time should you want to access your MobileMe account settings. This is where you can upgrade your plan should you need more than the stock 20GB of storage, change your billing info for the yearly charge of 79€, allocate storage to either your e-mail account or your iDisk and add a personal domain for websites hosted on MobileMe (for example websites created with iWeb on the Mac).

There’s more

Back to my Mac Back to my Mac allows you to access the data you have on your Mac at home and enables remote control — this obviously requires your Mac to be running and to be connected to the internet. There are reports that this feature doesn’t work very well. I cannot comment this since I didn’t use it yet.

iChat-Account Your MobileMe address can be used as a login for the .Mac/MobileMe/AOL Instant Messaging network.

Synchronisation MobileMe syncs your keychain, bookmarks, notes, contacts, calendars, configuration, e-mail accounts etc. with other Macs, PCs or iPhone/iPod Touch.

Issues

Missing: calendar subscriptions (iCal), intelligent mailboxes (Mail) and intelligent groups (Address Book) are not accessible via MobileMe’s web applications or the iPhone.

Integration between web apps: The demo shows it, but it’s not there: a Share function in iDisk. I’d like to replace DropSend, you know…

When composing a new e-mail, MobileMe’s Mail application should auto-complete names and e-mail addresses from the address book. Furthermore I’d like to be able to send e-mails to groups and to send vCards via e-mail without having to export them from the address book, downloading, switching to Mail and uploading.

MobileMe is not as pushy as advertised: Especially the first week the service had a lot of downtime. And while it pushes updates between MobileMe and iPhone, PCs and Macs are synced every 15 minutes (or even 60 minutes, in case your Mac isn’t already running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard). Many have since said that Apple is using paying members as beta testers — I’d say this is true. A service where certain features are switched on and off at times cannot be considered final.

Conclusion

Let me tell you this right away: I do not regret my purchase — it has been a bumpy start for MobileMe, but as long as it works (and it did for me most of the time) it is great. Having all my e-mail, contacts and calendars synced wirelessly between my iPhone and the MacBook Pro is great, the familiar interfaces of MobileMe’s web applications make it easy to work from other PCs or Macs.

MobileMe made me realize that I want iTunes to sync wirelessly as well. I’d love to have at least over-the-air synchronized podcasts, so that episodes I already watched on my 30″ Apple Cinema Display don’t show up marked as “new” on my iPhone.

What do you think? Are you using MobileMe? Sound off in the comments!

In case MobileMe doesn’t work for you: Take it with humour (and a grain of salt) and visit FailMe is more like it in the meantime.

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