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Apple's Mobile Me

Day 1: The Mobile Me switch over didn’t happen quite as smoothly as every would have hoped. Although this kind of thing is sort of expected with a massive service change over of this magnitude. It was scheduled to take about 8 hours, but took more like 48 to be up and running enough to be able to use it. This doesn’t really affect my overall feeling of the new service, just something to mention.

Switching User Name: The first step (for me anyway) was to switch my main Identity (formerly .Mac) name to one that I was using as an email only account. This would convert my email only account to an individual account and leave me with just the one name. I attempted to get ahold of Apple twice during the upgrades to get this taken care of, but as you would expect they were far too busy trying to get the service going to be able to help me with this account problem. So I waited until most of the system issues were solved and tried again. After speaking with one of their reps on chat, I had the account name switched over and setup with very little pain (with the exception of the 16 security questions he asked that I couldn’t remember the answers to) but hey, thats their job and it’s good they do it.

New Features: With the switch to Mobile me, us old .Mac users were buried in new features and a completely reworked system that was actually going to be useful now. Among some of the new features are:

  • Fancy new web interface
  • Bigger iDisk. 20GB
  • Better integration with iPhone
  • “Push” email and calendar
  • New email addresses of course @me.com

Although I don’t really use it, the web interface is really nice and usable, it feels very much like a desktop app. The bigger iDisk is nice, still not quite big enough, but much more usable at 20GB than it was at 10GB. The push email and calendar are great, mailing and calendaring are much more seamless between the iPhone and your desktop now. It seems that a lot of people really don’t like the “@me.com” but I am in the other camp, I really like it. I started using my new @me.com address 3 or 4 days before the launch of Mobile me and have completely switched to it being my main email address.

Overall: To sum it up I would say that I paid the $99 for .Mac and found it to be kinda useful, with the “free” upgrade to Mobile Me, I would say it was money well spent. If you never had .Mac and are thinking about getting Mobile Me for the first time, I would say definitely check it out. Apple has a nice long 60 day trial to really see if it fits your lifestyle and workflow.

If you need to sync your data across multiple machines constantly and always have your data where you are, this could definitely be the solution for you.

Apple’s 60 Day Trial of Mobile Me

[rating:4]