Dan Cunningham

So when MobileMe was launched, I immediately signed up for an email address on the 3 month trial. The idea of push email and calendar / contact syncing to my iPhone, over the cloud, was VERY appealing, In fact, it was basically the only reason I switched. I rarely bother plugging in my iPhone to my laptop to sync – maybe once every 3 weeks or so to get a few new tracks that I’ve bought from BeatPort. The Gallery and iDisk services of MobileMe are irrelevant to me as I’m terrible when it comes to remembering taking a camera anywhere, and I use Subversion for tracking all my projects which is available everywhere anyway.

Now, let me explain my setup a bit here as regards syncing. In work, I use Windows (XP and Vista): Lotus Notes for (work) email, calendar and contacts, and FireFox for web browsing. Since it’s a corporate environment, most internet traffic is locked down to specific ports, and a lot of sites are blocked. At home, I use a MacBook Pro: Mail.App, iCal and Address book, and FireFox for web browsing. Ideally, I wanted a system where I had everything available, everywhere.

Okay, so the first barrier to this is corporate policy – I can’t have my work email on a non-company approved device (such as the iPhone or MacBook Pro). That’s fine by me. I don’t want my work email on the go, I get stressed enough IN work without having to look at it at home However it would be nice to have my calendar on my iPhone, and my contacts sync’ed to Lotus Notes. Alas, MobileMe has no support for Lotus Notes and the hoops I’ve had to jump through trying to the info sync’ed was a nightmare. It had to be pushed from my Mac through iSync to Google Calendar and Contacts and then pulled into Lotus Notes. Inevitably, I’d lose calendar entries and contacts somewhere. It just wasn’t worth the hassle. Syncing calendar and contact info to Vista’s Calendar and Address book is also useless – my primary machine is XP.

I also thought that the ability to sync bookmarks between Windows and Mac would’ve been brilliant – but that meant switching to Safari on the Mac and Internet Explorer on PC. I’m perfectly happy with FireFox and find that FoxMarks syncs my bookmarks flawlessly, so that’s another MobileMe feature out the window.

So the reasons of the syncing nightmare seem to stem from the fact that MobileMe is in NO way open like Google (or even Lotus Notes to a degree). There’s no APIs, so I can’t built a little LotusScript to pull contact info from MobileMe, or write Calendar data. Sure, OSX allows you to do fun stuff with Cocoa, so I can automate the Address Book and iCal apps, but I don’t have direct access to my PC if I’m at home. I need to sync to/from the cloud.

Oh, and why do I need to have iTunes installed on my PC to sync anything anyway? Corporate policy prevents this.

Anyway, moving on from this…

Before the 3 month trial was up, Apple extended the trial by another 3 months – since the whole experience was plagued with problems. Because of even MORE problems with the first 6 months, the trial was extended again by another 3 months.

So as I said, my work machine is a PC and I’m stuck with using the MobileMe WebMail to read personal email (port lockdowns in work mean I can’t use something like Thunderbird). This has to be the biggest joke in the history of web-based applications. At least 4 times a day, I get kicked out of the application with a “Server Unavailable” message, emails randomly disappear after clicking Send, and more recently, the entire option of sending emails has been unavailable. I’ve had to resort to typing emails, saving as draft, and then opening them on the iPhone and clicking Send. Don’t get me wrong, the interface has the same polished look that everything Apple create does – but it’s a polished turd.

Twice during my trial period, my iPhone has synced to the cloud – which has decided that I have no contacts and deleted all the contacts on my phone. After a few hours this corrected itself, but during this time I was unable to contact anyone whose number I didn’t remember. I did try to get in touch with Apple support but was rather suprised to find that, unlike any other service I can think of that you pay for, there’s no way of directly contacting them! It’s primarily FAQs, Support KBs, and a community discussion board which Apple never participates in. There IS an online form on which Apple promises to try replying within 48 hours (ridiculously long SLA) and even then, the response I received ignored the fact that I was technical enough to know what the problem was, a cloud issue. Instead, I got a response which was very very obviously automated Hi! I’m Brenda. Have you tried turning it off and on again? Ehhh, how exactly do I reboot your cloud?

Oh and my favorite “feature” is in the calendars. I have a number of calendar subscriptions – most notably my Work calendar (synced to gCal from Lotus Notes through a nightmarish syncing tool that partially works) and Birthdays. Although iCal will see these just fine, my iPhone will not pick up subscriptions of any kind. The MobileMe Web calendar will only show the Birthdays subscription.

So, where does that leave me? Well, strongly in favour of moving back to GMail and GCal. GMail has IMAP, and setting my email to check every 15 minutes instead of it being pushed isn’t that huge a difference. I’m sure there’s some iPhone apps out there that will sync Calendar and Contact info from Google – there definitely is for OSX from / to Google, so why not for the iPhone?

And now here’s the killer problem. My MobileMe subscription expires in 6 days (as does a lot of day 1 MobileMe subscribers), after which I’ll be charged €70 a year for something that doesn’t do what it’s supposed very well, has little or no customer support, and has major stability issues. Unfortunately in order to do this, I need to switch back all my registrations at various sites, notify all my friends etc. Not a big deal, but what about all the other email I now get at MobileMe? Sure, I can forward them all back to GMail. Aha, but here’s the problem. I still have to pay €70 for the privilege of doing this for a year.

At MacWorld next week, Apple are expected to launch a raft of web apps like iWork and iWeb to tie in with MobileMe. This worries me a lot. When they can’t maintain the existing service, why would you bolt on even more potential problems?

Bottom line? I’d go as far to say that MobileMe should be free and put back into Beta. GMail, GCalender, Picasa, FoxMarks and DropBox will currently replace ALL of the functionlity in MobileMe as far as I can see. For Free. I’m stuck with MobileMe for at least a year. But I’m making a decision by March that if things haven’t shaped up – I’m switching back to GMail, and will still have a reasonable time period in which to forward my mail to GMail from MobileMe.

What I want fixed is foremost stability, followed by customer service. Subsequent to that, I think Apple REALLY need to open up MobileMe with APIs.

I know this has been long, but there’s a lot of issues I wanted to voice. I hope Apple is listening to it’s customers.