MobileMe Thoughts

[Rick76]

Not sure if this is the correct forum, please move if necessary.

I'm thinking of giving MobileMe at try and thought I would try to get some feedback before I "take the plunge". Preferrably from users that depend on MobileMe for business use.

I currently use Outlook 2003 to sync approximately 2,000 contacts and a very busy calendar for work and use Gmail for my personal stuff.

Any experiences, both positive and negative, would be appreciated.

[Vincent Ferrari]

Not sure if this is the correct forum, please move if necessary.

I'm thinking of giving MobileMe at try and thought I would try to get some feedback before I "take the plunge". Preferrably from users that depend on MobileMe for business use.

I currently use Outlook 2003 to sync approximately 2,000 contacts and a very busy calendar for work and use Gmail for my personal stuff.

Any experiences, both positive and negative, would be appreciated.

I've been a MobileMe / .Mac user for a long time, but I'm not really sure it'll handle that many contacts graciously. I've heard horror stories, and it does, on occasion, have availability issues, but for the most part it's pretty good. The online Mail is a clone of Mail.app and should work well for you.

At least they give you a trial ;-)

[WyattEarp]

I've only been using MobileMe since July and have had no real troubles with it. I've got it running along side an Exchange server at work plus Gmail for personal email. If you have those contacts from work and they use Exchange then you may not need MobileMe. Now if it's your own business then you may be better off with a hosted exchange solution like 4smartphone for example since it's for business use. MobileMe is more geared towards the individual than the business user or enterprise.

[Dyvim]

With a free trial, there's no reason not to take the plunge. Just make sure you make a backup of all your Outlook Contacts and Calendar appointments before you sync for the first time, just in case. I haven't had any issues with MobileMe losing my desktop data, but you never know and better safe than sorry. I took the free trial early on and had my free trial extended twice for a total of 5 months! Now that's a fairly decent trial period. It finally ends in early December and I have a hard decision coming up as to whether it is really worth $99/year, which is a lot of money (considering that Gmail, Hotmail, etc. are free and even paid versions with POP3 access and expanded online storage space run around $20/year).

Pros of MobileMe:


Push email
Contacts / Calendar Sync esp. if you have multiple computers or even better a mixed network of PCs and Macs, and/or multiple iPhones/Touches.
Bookmark sync
iDisk with 10 GB storage
photo galleries with upload integrated into built-in Photos app

Cons of MobileMe:


Expensive
Weird sync nag messages popping up on desktop (such as repeated warnings that my account has expired even though it won't expire until next month, repeated warnings that sync failed, and repeated warnings that more than 5% of my items have changed when that is not the case)
Service outages of push email (better now, this was more of a problem close to launch)
Push email periodically stops on iPhone (or iPhone stops checking email), this happens with Yahoo! push too but at least that's free), so you can't rely on the push the way you can with a Blackberry. I think this is an iPhone issue rather than a MobileMe issue, but still...
Bookmark sync only syncs with Internet Explorer or Safari and not my browser of choice: Firefox. Apple, where is the Firefox love?
Contacts/Calendar Sync from device to MobileMe occasionally flakes out (stops synching changes down), requiring me to overwrite everything on the device with what's in the cloud (turn synching Off then On again). This happens mostly when I make a lot of changes at once on the desktop like moving large groups of Contacts from one folder to another. Hasn't been a problem yet for me because I mostly enter/update PIM info on the desktop and essentially treat my iPhones as readonly copies of that info. The problem for me is more in terms of having certainty that my iPhone is up-to-date (since you don't immediately realize when the phone has stopped syncing correctly).
Contacts/Calendar Sync from Outlook on PC flakes out when I travel (IP address changes?)- it tells me that I've never synched before and forces me to do an initial sync (overwrite PC, overwrite MobileMe, or merge- I choose overwrite MobileMe because my PC copy is the master copy), and then does the same when I come back home. My work around for now is to not try to MobileMe sync PIM info from my laptop PC when I travel, but this is lame.

For me the #1 selling point is the Contacts/Calendar sync. Despite the issues I've had, it's much better than syncing through iTunes (since it happens OTA and does all 3 household iPhones at once) and it finally migrated my PIM info from my PC to my new MacBook (which I still have no idea how to use properly being a Windows veteran and Mac newbie), plus puts a copy of everything in the cloud. I also really like the fact that the iPhone allows you to sync from both Exchange and MobileMe Contacts and Calendars, so you can have push OTA sync of both work and personal PIM info- this is simply brilliant.

I haven't used MobileMe mail that much. I had a weird problem with emails deleted from the device eternally reappearing if I used multi-delete (had to delete them one at a time or else from the web interface), and found the push aspect to be no more reliable than Yahoo's (i.e. periodically stops without warning due to what I assume are iPhone firmware issues). I'm currently using GMail as my master personal email with a copy forwarded to a Yahoo! account for push notification on the iPhone (and also to keep a small Inbox of important messages in the Yahoo! account for quick access whereas my GMail has everything). I tried swapping the Yahoo! for MobileMe (forward to that instead), but it wasn't any better and in some cases worse, so I switched back to using Yahoo! for push notification. I'm not ready to migrate all my personal email from GMail to either Yahoo! or MobileMe (esp. since I don't know if I will continue as a paid MobileMe customer).