Apple's suite of online services made headlines last year when it changed its name from .Mac to MobileMe. Not because anyone cared what it was called, but because the revamp went so badly that the internet resounded for months with the caterwauls of dissatisfied users.
To cut a long story short, MobileMe is now fixed and does all the things it was supposed to – syncing your email, contacts and calendars between devices; hosting websites; storing and transferring files, and creating online photo galleries – without falling over. Which is nice.
But are those things enough to justify the asking price of £59 a year? Let's take a closer look at what you get for your cash.
Mail bonding
MobileMe's best trick is 'push'. When someone sends you an email, it pops up immediately on your iPhone or iPod touch, wherever you may be (that's if you've got a Wi-Fi connection or, with the iPhone, O2 reception) cutting out the need to waste time and battery checking every few minutes just in case.
Any changes to Address Book or iCal are also transferred. It all works the other way round as well, so contacts and appointments you add on the move are immediately reflected on your Mac. Emails appear on the iPhone faster than texts, sometimes within one second of being sent.
In fact, syncing can be almost too fast: click the To Do icon in OS X Mail, and the new item appears on your iPhone before you've even typed what it is you have to do.
The only limitation is, as far as we can establish and despite claims to the contrary, that MobileMe doesn't push to your Mac – Mail still has to check the server at preset intervals, set in Mail > Preferences > General.
It's incredibly convenient to know you'll see the same messages, contacts and calendars on your main Mac and iPhone or iPod touch, any other Macs running Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later and PCs: MobileMe can also sync Microsoft Outlook and Windows Address Book, and a MobileMe Control Panel is installed in Windows as part of the iTunes download (the latest version is 1.4).
LOTS OF OPTIONS: With MobileMe you can see the same mail, contacts and calendars on your main Mac in OS X Leopard, an older Mac running Tiger, an iPhone or iPod touch, or on a PC via Safari for Windows
MobileMe isn't the only way to sync, though. Google Mail, for example, can also sync and push to Macs, PCs and iPhones, and Google Calendar and Contacts can join the fun too. However, while setting up MobileMe is as easy as entering your member name and password, Google's tools take a bit more effort if you want to get them to sync.
It's not impossible, but there's a fair bit of headscratching involved before it typically runs smoothly. If you get your work email from a Microsoft Exchange server, you can get email pushed to your iPhone or iPod touch by setting up an Exchange ActiveSync account, as explained here.
However, you can't have it both ways: mail can only be synced from MobileMe or Exchange, not both. (With contacts and calendars, both systems can coexist but won't merge with each other.) If you use, say, Exchange for work and MobileMe for personal email, a solution is to sync one and set the other to forward all mail to that account.
Your comments (13) Click to add a new comment
lovlid
October 13th
13. @ ghostshadow.
"When you shop at the supermarket, do you ask the manager to "justify" the price of an item?"
YES you DO. If the apple costs too much and tastes funny, of course you do.
@ jragosta.
Of course the journalists get it. As you say in your post, "if enough people buy it, its a success". But if you didn't read about it first, you wouldn't buy it, therefor, not a success.
And come on, would you buy an M6 without taking it for a test drive?
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marktyers
October 11th
12. I have not renewed my MobileMe account. I bought a family pack but decided I could get most of what I wanted for free! The family now use Gmail and google calendars which provide Exchange push. For cloud storage I replaced my iDisk with DropBox which provides 2GB plus up to another 3GB if you recommend friends, which means I now have 5GB for free! It also syncs far better than MobileMe.
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ghostshadow
October 11th
11. What makes MobileMe worth £59 a year?
If you don't think that it's worth it, then don't pay. It's that simple. Apple doesn't have to "justify" anything.
When you shop at the supermarket, do you ask the manager to "justify" the price of an item? Of course not. Either you pay or you don't.
So I guess I don't get the point.
BTW--why make site registration so difficult at TechRadar?
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ctwise
October 11th
10. "The article states you cannot push to a MobileMe account and an Exchange account both. This is incorrect. You can not activesync more than one Exchange account. You can however use activesync for one exchange account and still receive push mail for MobileMe."
You can get push mail from multiple accounts but you can't get push calendars and contacts. If you push sync calendars and contacts with Exchange you can't also push sync them with MobileMe. You have to choose.
You can get MobileMe for less then what Apple charges for it. Amazon.co.uk charges £53.29 for it. That works for renewals as well as initial purchases.
It's worth it for me and I really only use one service - the syncing of mail, contacts and calendars. That's because it works seamlessly with both the Mac and the iPhone. Easy enough for my wife to use so we can share calendars. I can locate the phones if I need to as well. That's enough for me to justify it.
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jragosta
October 11th
9. @munkstar: "2. Oh no another fanboy response ..."
That's the kind of mindless response that establishes your inability to think logically.
My response was not that of a 'fanboy' of any time. I would have made the same response if someone had asked Microsoft to justify their price for Windows 7 Ultimate or BMW to justify the price of an M6. It's a simple matter of how capitalism works. Vendors set prices and customers can choose to buy, not buy, or (in some cases), negotiate. Expecting a vendor to every whining blogger who comes along just because that blogger doesn't like the price is inane.
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roberto
October 11th
8. I've used this service for years,.mac before it became mobile me,and its a great service and at just over £1 p.w its pretty good value!!
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