MobileMe Worth it?
So, its been a bit since I posted anything, and a long time since I posted any kind of review or tech review, but I am gonna tell you about my experiences with Apple’s MobileMe service.
Per Apple, “MobileMe is a service that pushes new email, contacts, and calendar events over the air to all your devices. So your iPhone, Mac, and PC stay in perfect sync. No docking required. And that’s just one of many ways MobileMe simplifies your life.”
So why MobileMe? After all its not exactly cheap at $99/year for an individual and $149/year for a family pack. Well, it basically just works. You log into the MobileMe control center on your mac and/or PC, or add a new account to the iPhone and after that you can pretty much forget it. Whenever you enter something in your calendar or address book it syncs across all your connect devices almost instantaneously. It also offers an online disk in iDisk that you can copy files to, mirror a directory on your hard drive, and backup you setting from your computer to. Pretty Handy. Lastly, it comes with a Gallery that allows you to share photos with friends and family. Lastly, it has a full featured webmail application complete with your own me.com address.
MobileMe also has a pretty nice web interface offering pretty much the same things you get in the desktop versions of iLife online. Its not completely compatible with IE7 and warns you of such, but I haven’t had any trouble doing anything with it from work. That’s another plus for me personally. The government firewall at works lets me log into it without issue. Most of the time for me, adding contacts or appointments is easier to do at my computer rather than on the touch keyboard of the iPhone. I can’t use my personal MacBook Pro at work, so being able to log into the web app is a definite plus.
Now MobileMe does have its issues. The Gallery is pretty much open to the public unless you secure each gallery separately. Then you have to share the direct link to the gallery instead of the root gallery link. Why you can’t just require people to log in to see the gallery period is beyond me. Sometimes the Calendar gets a little messed up, placing the occasional appointment on the wrong day on the online application. And once my contact groups got really borked after testing a new iPhone Contact app. It required me to kill MobileMe contact sync, overwrite all my contacts from the computer to my iPhone again, then resync the MobileMe stuff to fix it. Wasn’t hard, just a bit inconvenient. It didn’t mess up any contacts and they were all still available from the “all” category, but it did cause me to do some work to straighten it out. Also there doesn’t seem to be anyway to truly share a calendar between users, even under the same MobileMe account. You basically have to workaround the issue by having multiple users logging in to the same individual account in order to have a hope of getting this to work, and that causes other issues.
The biggest issue I had though, is the price. I am a big proponent of free after all. All the features above are available for free with a little work, most notably from Google. Google can sync your email, contacts, and calendar using the Neuvasync service or their own Google Sync now. (On a side note, I have used both services and recommend them) However, I never kept my contacts in sync because of GMails odd way it keeps track of them and the inability to sync every necessary field. I also had to use Sunbird to get true syncing of GCal because neither iCal nor Outlook offerred the ability to sync calendars with GCal, just one way subscriptions. Google also has Picasa, a nice desktop photo application, a la iPhoto, that syncs to its own web albums, and of course there are always the old standbys in Flickr, Facebook, Gallery, etc.
Instead of iDisk, you can use Dropbox, another service I can highly recommend. In fact, I still use it. Dropbox gives you 2GB of free storage, and you can pay if you want more. It works pretty seamlessly from your computer. You get a Dropbox folder, and anything you drop in there is sync’ed to the online drive seamlessly. It has a nice web interface, and even an iPhone App to access those files if you are away from your computer.
There is one thing I haven’t mentioned that MobileMe offers that I haven’t found a like for yet - “Find My iPhone.” You click on the web application in your MobileMe web interface and you can locate your iPhone anywhere in the world through its onboard GPS. Handy if you lost it, and the main reason I decided to try out MobileMe. I left my iPhone at a restaurant. Lucky I realized it pretty quick and went back and retrieved it before it disappeared. Had it disappeared, however, I could have located it and then locked it with a new passcode as well as sending a notification (complete with 2 minutes of alarm noise) to the holder in hopes of retrieving it. Had I been unable to retrieve it, I could have wiped it clean. All from the MobileMe web interface. There are a few apps that try to replicate that service, but most require you to start an app, or hope that the person holding your lost iPhone opens that app before you can get a fix on the iPhone. None offer the ability to lock or remote wipe the phone that I can find. I really wish Apple would offer just this service for a smaller fee instead of requiring the whole MobileMe package.
Finally, there are a few other small items that MobileMe offers that are nice, like “Back to My Mac”, calendar publishing, and family packages. Will I end up purchasing MobileMe when my free trial is up? Probably. Why? Well not because it offers something unique, but because its convenient and the “Find My iPhone” application offers a certain amount of security I need. Like I said before, if Apple would offer this part of MobileMe as a separate service, I would sign up in a heartbeat as would a lot of iPhone users I bet. After all AT&T won’t help you track your phone, or even cut the service to a lost/stolen iPhone unless you buy a new phone and transfer the account to it.
So, not much of a personal update, but I hope its useful to someone.
Update
It seems that NeuvaSync also offers a remote wipe feature now, and not only for iPhones. Its not free, but $25 is still a lot cheaper than MobileMe. Still no “Find my iPhone” like feature. Everything I have found for that requires the thief to actually click a masked app to get a fix or the owner has to run an app while the phone is locked.
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