Mobile Me, Mine No More.
I got my Mobile Me account as soon as it became available on the web, I signed up for the free trial and started using it right away. My problems only started when I sign up, at that moment the site was down all the time and most of its features weren’t working. I activated all the sync features and pray for it to work.
Steve didn’t hear my prayers, the first annoyance was the disappearance of my contacts, they didn’t go away forever, but they were missing from my phone for a while. I logged into Mobile Me on the web and notice that my contacts were in fact right there in the cloud but they were not syncing to my phone.
After waiting for a miracle to happen, I disabled the option to update my contacts. That left me only with Mobile Me mail, iCal, Gallery, and iDisk. For one I never used iDisk, I did read around the web that the link feature was not working at the time, so I didn’t even bother. The gallery feature was not of a big interest, but I must say that if I had stay with
Mobile Me I would have used it.
The Mobile Me mail worked well all the time, I didn’t have the problem of missing emails, but I must add that this was a new account and almost nobody had that email address. iCal in the other hand, frustrated me at levels you have no idea. I would update items that will never make it to the phone, added items to the phone that would never ever made it to my computer, and so on.
The last thing that made me decide to cancel my account was the news item that some international customer were charged for the Mobile Me membership while in the trial period. This problem never affected anyone in the U.S. but it was enough for me to decide that Mobile Me is a problem that I don’t need.
Since then, there is a letter from Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, where he expresses that he is not happy with all the problems Mobile Me has caused to everybody, he acknowledge that Mobile Me is not up to Apple standards and regrets the decision of launching it all together with iPhone firmware 2.0 and the App Store.
Maybe Mobile Me will work some day, but the truth is that I don’t need these kind of services anyway. I’m a happy user of Gmail, imap helps me keeping my inbox up to date no matter where I am. I don’t use the calendar enough to make it the excuse, I have my own hosting account where I can load as many pictures as I want for my family to see.
I always carry my Flash Key with all the documents I could possibly need, and I back it up to my Mac every now and then. Anyone could argue that I’m missing the Push, but I’m convinced that Mobile Me needs to impress me way more than this for me to spend $99 on it. I’m still an Apple fan boy, but Mobile Me will be the only product I don’t really want from Apple, at least for now.
Share your Mobile Me experiences with my community, tell us all about what you like or dislike about Mobile Me. You can use my forums or simply leave a message on this post. Thanks for reading.
