A Year With MobileMe

A lot has happened in the past year for Apple’s MobileMe. A less than fluid jump from .mac to MobileMe left some without features that the service promised while observers criticized an apparent lack of planning on Apple’s part.

I bought an iPhone and with that came a discounted price for MobileMe. I figured that I’d give MobileMe a try, see if it added to my iPhone experience…or whatever I was thinking at the time.

I don’t know if I signed up for MobileMe to get a fun email address with an exciting @me.com suffix or if I signed up because the idea of syncing everything to a mysterious “cloud” was appealing.

But I logged in for the first time and set up my iPhone and all of a sudden my contacts populated MobileMe. “That’s cool, let me try my schedule,” I thought. This was where MobileMe lost me. During the initial months of MobileMe’s launch, some users were having problems syncing their calendars between iCal, the iPhone and MobileMe where each wanted to do its own thing. I was one of those troubled users.

As for sharing photos and using the iDisk, I have a Flickr account which I use regularly and no real need for online storage. Most of what I need to store can be done with an email which is low-tech, I know, but it works. Can’t argue with success. I haven’t revisited MobileMe since the iDisk iPhone app came out nor do I care to. I have no need for it.

I love the idea of syncing my contacts continuously and my calendar if 1) it worked and 2) I actually kept a calendar consistently. iPhone backups save everything so at most all I’d ever lose is one or two contacts that I may add during the day. Those can easily be re-added. A web app is a great way to quickly and efficiently edit contact information but how often does that really come up in a way that can’t be done on the iPhone?

In the end I see MobileMe as a service for the mid-to-low-end user: the user who wants to keep their Address Book and calendar consistent across platforms at all times or the user that wants to share photos but doesn’t want to get too involved, the user who wants to store a document online now and then.

And that’s where my year with MobileMe went. Nowhere. I opened an account because it was shiny and new and when I had problems with it I abandoned the service. Needless to say I won’t be re-subscribing next year. I’ll stick to iPhone backups for contacts, Flickr for photos and email for small file storage. Sorry, Apple.

  1. zackshapiro posted this