Mobile Me – About Time
The day apple released the iPhone, and in the process, provided only minimal support for its own .Mac service – I was perplexed. What the heck were they thinking? Every other Apple solution allowed for total syncing of Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, and more. Why didn’t the iPhone? In the age of ActiveSync, Blackberry Enterprise, and other solutions offering full sync of at least email, contacts, and calendars it makes no sense. The iPhone seemed a perfect match for .Mac services, and therefore a point of discontent as a .Mac user. (I immediately took the opportunity to provide feedback to Apple.)
To me, this was the one big screw up of the iPhone. The phone is great otherwise. Why would they not make better integration?
This week’s announcement of “Mobile Me” finally provides an answer. It just happens to be a bit late - a common theme for .Mac. It seems as though they finally got the details figured out on making all this push and sync stuff working with their own services; something that should have been done long ago. When Steve Jobs commented during his keynote that they finally “got it right” with .Mac, it seems that even he recognized the blunder.
The question for Apple will now be, is this enough to draw more people to .Mac Mobile Me? I think there is potential, but it may be a hard sell job. The ability to keep all your messaging and collaboration data in sync on any of your Apple devices (and even Windows now) is huge in my book. I no longer have to plug my phone into my Mac to sync that stuff. To finally have a more complete web-based solution to go with it, definitely a plus. The 20GB of data storage seems a bit meager on the surface. However, in the context of how iDisk works (local syncing to your desktop), I can see why larger storage could potentially be a nightmare to keep under control. I still think they could offer at least 40GB, and sweeten the deal. After all, they are asking $100 a year.
The web hosting is fine, and good that they have already allowed for personal domain names. However, this piece still seems incomplete. Why not include DNS hosting for that domain? Why not let users have email accounts at their personal domain? I hope that they work on this part of the package.
All in all, Mobile Me looks like it will be a welcome change, and big step forward. I hope they continue improving it after launch.
