Pros & Cons
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- Push-syncing of mail, calendars, contacts for iPhone, iPod Touch users.
- Better-looking drag-and-drop Web interface.
- Storage increased to 20GB.
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- No more online site-building, groups, eCards, Slides Publisher.
Apple MobileMe Specs
| Product Category | Software |
| Product Category | Web Site Hosting Services |
| Product Price Type | Direct |
Note that I tested the service on the first day of availability, and I did run into the occasional snag: The system occasionally logged me out without my permission and sometimes took an inordinate amount of time to load; e-mail messages wouldn't display, and then I'd be told there was nothing in my inbox, only to have it reappear a few seconds later. These are certainly first-day issues, and probably just a matter of Apple's servers settling in. In any case, access to mail and the other services seems entirely uninterrupted if you use the Mac desktop apps like Mail. Despite these birthing-pain issues, moving around the interface was quite snappy and desktop-like, thanks to its updated Web 2.0-style coding.
What's New?
Foremost among the upgrades are redesigned Web interfaces and the increase in storage to 20GB (up from 10GB). You can divvy this space between e-mail and storage in whatever proportions you like. The redesigned look of MobileMe's applications much more closely resembles the Mac interface. The very same icons as those you see in the dock for Mail, Address Book, and Calendar show up on the top of your MobileMe page. I should note that the app was more stable in Safari than in Firefox.
One worry that should be dispensed with right away is that you'll lose your .Mac addresses for your e-mail, Web sites, and gallery URLs. Never fear, the .Mac addresses will still work, but a .me equivalent will be added. For new signups, only the .me addresses will be available. The .Mac addresses will also still work for purchases from the iTunes Store and the Apple Online Store, but, although the old address will still work in iChat, the new address will be a separate chat identity. In any case, I'd recommend getting a free AIM account for this, in case you stop subscribing to MobileMe for some reason.
From the moment you first log in to me.com, you'll notice a big change in the service's interface: There's no longer a portal-type page showing all the services in a menu down the right side. Instead, you're always inside one of the apps, with icons along the top to switch you to one of the others. When you first sign in, you're taken into iDisk, and the first time you switch to another app, you'll be presented with a choice to view the Getting Started with MobileMe instructional QuickTime video.—
Pushing Your E-mail
Of course, the Microsoft Exchange-like pushing of e-mail to a mobile device is the banner feature of MobileMe. And it mostly worked as advertised. When I sent a test e-mail to my @me account, a few seconds later I received a notification bell and a vibration on my iPhone, which is running the 2.0 software. One odd thing to note: When I changed the iPhone settings to add the @me address, the existing @mac address was also changed to @me, resulting in two identical mail account entries. So sending one e-mail resulted in a 2 appearing in the red icon where the phone informs you how many new mails you have. I thought this would be easily fixed by deleting the extra account, but doing that deleted both! Another iPhone setup issue for MobileMe's push is that by default, Contact, Calendar, and Bookmark syncing are turned off.
There's an auto-complete feature for entering e-mail addresses, you can flag messages for follow-up, search for contacts, and move mail to folders with drag and drop—all features you'll also find in the excellent, and free, Yahoo! Mail. But one nicety MobileMe Mail adds is QuickReply, accessible from the curled arrow button at the right of the e-mail's entry in your list. With this feature, you don't even have to open a message to send a reply—a small window for your text pops up.
I also tried setting up my Microsoft Outlook 2007 e-mail client with my MobileMe mail account, and was able to read the mail there without incident. One note about the setup, however: Outlook at first sets it up as a POP account by default, so you need to use manual settings. Another point about setup is that if you're on a Windows PC, you need to have
A couple of final e-mail issues: Apple touts the MobileMe mail client as "ad-free." I'd hope that's the case for a nearly $100-a-year service, when Yahoo! Mail Pro account supplies that for $20 a year! The Apple service features spam filtering (as does Yahoo!'s, of course—for free).
The new Contacts app lets you search for a contact and organize contacts into groups using drag-and-drop. One clever mashup lets you see Google maps of your contact's physical address on his or her entry page. The MobileMe calendar, too, gets a slick UI update. Of course, you can view the new calendar by day, week, or month, but you can even show multiple calendars' entries, distinguished by color-coding, on the same calendar. Adding an appointment is slickly implemented: just drag the mouse cursor down, and you can move appointments around with good old drag-and-drop. And this includes moving an appointment from one calendar to another, which changes its color, presto!—
iDisk
The iDisk service has remained unaffected by the transition from .Mac to MobileMe, save for the Web interface. Also remaining unchanged is the installable Backup 3 software, which manages automated file and folder backup to your online iDisk storage. There's still no drag-and-drop uploading, but you can drag files that are already in the iDisk around to different folders.
Sure, there are many online storage and
File sharing has been enhanced from .Mac. You can share a file through e-mail, and can even require the downloader to use a password. The Public folder that lets you assign a URL and a password is still there, but now you can share any file on iDisk, too. Note, this feature was not live yet at testing time. I'll give it a look when it is, and update this review.
Web Gallery
The Web gallery stylishly displays your digital photos and movies, and integrates effortlessly with
.Mac was really just a display of the pictures, without much interactivity options. There was basically no menu—you just looked at the pictures. Now the MobileMe Gallery adds online choices for rearranging and rotating photos and editing titles. And you can let gallery visitors upload their own photos to your gallery, subscribe to its updates, download full-size pictures, and send the link to a friend. One cool feature is how running the cursor across a gallery image displays each picture in the gallery successively; this also works for fast forwarding through movie files.
What's Unchanged?
Along with Backup, mentioned above, several .Mac features will continue to function unchanged. The Back to My Mac remote control between Macs will still work. iDisk will still be accessible from the Finder. Support for and integration with iLife apps continues, including iWeb site publishing, Photo and movie sharing from iPhoto and iMovie. Mac-to-Mac syncing of contacts, calendars, and bookmarks remains.
What's Gone?
First of all, if you don't at least have OS X 10.4 (Tiger) you're out of luck—that's the oldest version of the OS that MobileMe supports.
The main changes show Apple refining its platform to target it more narrowly for use with the iPhone. You'll no longer be able to build a site online with HomePage, or use Slides Publisher or the iCards e-greeting Web app. For these activities, you'll need a copy of iLife and use its iWeb app. Apple representatives told us that the removed features were only used by a small percentage of .Mac users.
Finally, Web access to bookmarks has been excised, but you'll still be able to sync bookmarks between your Macs and PCs. The Learning Center, too, has been scrapped, but MobileMe will include tutorials at Apple.com and help content at me.com. Finally, .Mac Groups have disappeared, so you might want to head over to Yahoo! Groups instead.
Upwardly Mobile
The upshot is that iPhone and touch owners get more, but Web and desktop users get somewhat less. They do get slicker Web applications, drag-and-drop, and more powerful Web gallery options, but lose online site building and a few other crumbs. Much stays the same—things like backup and remote control—but I regret the loss of included online site building, groups, and eCards. It's somewhat unfortunate but maybe predictable that Apple has decided to reward iPhone users, whose numbers it's trying to bolster.
Another key question is whether MobileMe, iPhone syncing aside, can compete with alternatives like Web-based mail from the likes of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. With some of these services offering unlimited e-mail storage and lots of photo and video storage, along with slick interfaces of their own, it's hard to make a case. The free Yahoo! Mobile even can push e-mails to the iPhone (though not contacts). For the same roughly $99 a year,
So in the end, while, yes, you can get most of what MobileMe offers for free from Web services like box.net, Yahoo! Mail, and Picasa Web albums, you can't get them all together in such a clean, elegant interface. And if you're an iPhone user or a user of Mac's excellent creativity apps like iWeb and iPhoto, the tight integration with the Mac makes MobileMe hard to beat.
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Final Thoughts
Apple MobileMe
Apple delivers a slick suite of Web applications and the ability to push e-mail, contacts, and calendar information to iPhones and the iPod Touch. The integration with included apps and Mac desktop applications is hard to beat, though many of the services can be had for free from sites like Flickr, box.net and Yahoo! Mail.