So a buddy of mine IM's me today and asks me about Mobile Me. If you haven't heard about Mobile Me it's Apple's on-line service for email, contacts, calendars, pictures, and storage. It's actually the revamped version of .Mac.
Of course I bought it the day it came out along with the iPhone because of one key feature that it has is, "push" email, contacts and calendars. Apple touts it as "Exchange" for the rest of us. I'll go down each feature and give you what I think and what really matters to me and you, namely does it work and is it easy to use.
Well I'll be honest with everyone, the first day I got it I registered it and I was a bit disappointed because everything was buggy and slow. However, this was because the .Me servers were being pounded by everyone else registering and syncing their information. So I've let it settle a bit and now it appears to work fairly well. Also unless specified otherwise this will work with your iPod touch assuming it's hooked up to a WiFi network.
Mail: So one thing Mobile Me doesn't make very clear is that push mail is only available on your @me.com mail. You can't have your
gmail accounts "pushed" by Mobile me. This was a bit of a bummer but I found a way around it. What I do is have all my Gmail forward to my .me account that way mail is pushed to the .me servers and then pushed to my iPhone, when I reply, I reply using the Gmail out going servers so when people get my emails they see it come from
richmlee@gmail.com. I've been using this work around for about a week now and it works out great. The only problem is that on my iPhone you have to have your
gmail account active too so I'll get my
gmail pushed to me via my .me account and then 15 min later I get a pull into my
gmail in box too so I get the same email twice. The reason I have to have the
gmail account active is because I need to have the
gmail out going server on. Not a huge deal but so far it's the only the draw backs to my work around. One other note, "push" is only from the .me server and to the iPhone, mail isn't "pushed" to your PC/Mac, your PC/Mac will be set up to "fetch" mail from .me or
gmail. .Me can't push email to your PC/Mac.
Contacts: So far the .me push contacts works great. Anytime you make a change/add/delete a contact from the .me site it automatically pushes it to your iPhone and you'll see the change almost instantly. I tested this and was pretty impressed at the speed of the updates. This is also true the other way around. When you make a change/add/delete a contact from your iPhone your phone will push it to the .me server and you'll see the change. However there is no "push" to your PC/Mac, your PC/Mac will again be set up to "fetch" these changes. But all your changes will be synced up even without you physically connecting your iPhone to sync to your PC/Mac.
Calendar: The calendar in .me works the same way that contacts do, changes/add/deletes of your calendar made from the .me website are pushed to your iPhone and vice verse. The online calendar is very clean and easy to use, it's similar to Google calendar. You can also manage multiple calendars as well such as a work calendar, personal calendar, and adding any other calendar, and they are color coded so you know on any give day, week, and month at a glace what you have that is personal and work related. I tested changes/adds/deletes from .me to my iPhone and vice verse and it worked really well. Again no push to your PC/Mac, it'll have to fetch.
Gallery: I like this feature, it's a great way to share photos with family and friends. The interface is very clean and obviously "Apple" slick. You can browse and view photos in a variety of ways instead of just the thumb nail view a lot of other sides offer. The added feature with Gallery is that your friends can download and keep the full original quality of the photos. This is great because a lot of times when you upload photos they are automatically resided and you don't get to see or down load the picture it in full quality. Another cool feature is that your friends can add photos to the gallery all they do is click the upload button and they can upload the full size and quality photo directly to you for you to have. Another great feature of gallery is that it supports full
RSS feeds that your Friends and family can subscribe to. So anytime you add or edit photos your friends and family will be notified and they can go download your latest photos. If you have a Mac sharing from
iPhoto 08 is ridiculously easy, just pick the album you want to share check a few options and click publish. This would be a life safer if say you're having triplets and you're taking a three times the pictures of any other parents and trying to share them. Take pics with your iPhone and share them instantly as well on your mobile me gallery. It's an awesome way to share and organize your photos. Apple has posted a sample gallery here:
http://gallery.me.com/emily_parkerSo you can see how the functionally works. Check it out.
iDisk: Have you ever wanted to email big files only to have your email says that the file is too big or that some type of file is not allowed to be emailed on their servers? Well
iDisk solves this problem. It's like having a portable hard dive on the Internet at all times where you can access it from any web browser. You can store all your important files you want to have instant access to anytime you're near a PC. You also have a public drive that everyone has access to to download and upload files. Even if you're storing files in your private folder sharing those files are easy. Just click the file you want to share and you can email that person with a link, you can even set a down load limit, an expiring date and other options, once done that person will receive an email and they'll just click download and they'll have the file. You can also "mount"
iDisk on your Mac or PC and access them as a virtual drive from Finder (Mac) or Windows Explorer, just like you were browsing your local hard drive. It's a great way to share files. .Me also has pretty generous band with and storage size.
Pricing: An individual account costs $99 per year and gets 20 gigs of storage for email and
iDisk. 10 gigs for email and 10 gigs for storage with a 1 gig file size upload limit and 200 gigs of bandwidth per month. A Family Pack subscription costs $149 per year and includes one Individual account with 20GB of combined email and file storage, plus four Family Member accounts, each with its own email address and 5GB of storage. Convert an Individual account to a Family Pack anytime you like — you just pay the difference.
Conclusion: You can use .Me either with a Mac or PC, that's right you're not required to have a Mac, however some of the features are much easier on a Mac but you can pretty much do the same things on a PC as well. .Me is fairly easy to use, it's now speedy, and offers a lot of great features. While that are some places that offer these same services for free, you're really getting a whole lot of features and Mac stability as well. It's a little on the pricey side, but for a limited time if you buy a new iPhone or new Mac you'll get $30 bucks off the price of either an individual account or family pack. But I think for the features and ease of use it's worth the price of admission.
Got questions? Email me:
richmlee@gmail.com
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