Andrew Gormley

In July, MobileMe will have been around for exactly one year in it’s current incarnation.  It was always one technology that I was hesitant to jump right into because I felt like it was a tad superfluous.  I mean, why would I want to pay for over-the-air syncing of my Address Book or phone numbers when it’s just as easy for me to plug my phone in and sync thru iTunes?  Throughout the past three months I’ve found that there’s a lot more to MobileMe than just syncing contacts and information wirelessly. Let me tell you a bit about it…

What it offers

At it’s most basic level, MobileMe provides a dead-simple way to keep all of your contacts, calendar events, and Apple-provided me.com email account completely linked up.  This means that if you add a contact on your iPhone, it’ll automagically get sent to “the cloud” and be synced down to your computer’s address book application.  You could also add a series of events to iCal or your Outlook calendar, give them a label, and color code them and within minutes they’ll appear on your iPhone calendar exactly as you’ve added them. If you mark an email on your @me.com account as read, and move it to your ”Follow Up” folder while in Mail.app,  that’s exactly how and where you’ll find the email on your iPhone.

I think you get the picture about how tight the integration is.  The best part is at no time do your iPhone and computer have to be connected, this all happens wirelessly and instantaneously.

Stacking it up

Two out of three of those features (Address Book and Calendar syncing) can be acquired for free from a similar service called Google Sync.  You can see my write-up and review of that on my Google Sync Follow Up article.  The difference between the two is as simple as whether you prefer Google products or Apple products.

With Google Sync, you’ll be working within the realm of Gmail, Google Contacts, and Google Calendar. Your Gmail account also won’t be Push, which is probably a negligible feature for the casual user.

Using MobileMe, Apple’s Mail, Address Book, and iCal will be your primary desktop programs for viewing and editing contacts, events, etc.  Notice that when using Google Sync your information will be stored online at all times whereas with MobileMe your information is accessible from the web (via me.com), but can also be manipulated with desktop applications quickly and easily.

The extra mile

The aforementioned features alone weren’t enough to persuade me to the MobileMe side of the fence.  It was the additional value adds that Apple tacked on which sweetened the deal and made it a worthwhile purchase.

1. Bookmarks Sync
   This might seem like a small thing, but for someone like me who’s constantly bookmarking articles and interesting things for later consumption and classification, this is a life (and time) saver.  Anything I bookmark on my phone gets synced back to my computer and vice versa, so I’m never away from my bookmarks.
2. Back To My Mac
   This has proven to be indispensable for me since I’m not always home to access my computer.  Basically, you log in to your MobileMe account on your primary Mac and then when you log in to MobileMe on any other Mac (on the same network or 500 miles away), you’ll be able to access all of the files on your home machine AND share the screen.  In the past I’d often find myself forgetting a snippet of code or image file when working on a website remotely and would pretty much have to make do without it, but now with Back To My Mac it’s as easy as mounting my home machine on the desktop as a disk and continuing on easily and painlessly.
3. iDisk
   Apple goes ahead and throws you 20GB of space  and 200GB of monthly bandwidth to divide up however you’d like.  By default it’s split evenly down the middle between file space and mail, although you can adjust it however you’d like from the me.com control panel. I’ll reserve my comments about iDisk for the next section
4. Gallery
   This is a dead simple and damn sexy way to look at your photos and videos.  On a desktop web browser you’re given a few options for how you’d like to browse and when viewing on the iPhone it looks identical to skimming your photo albums.  It’s such a rich experience it almost feels like you’re using a desktop application.  You can view one of my photo galleries right here: Bella Ragazza.
5. iLife Integration
   I use iPhoto for organizing all of my pictures and the integration of MobileMe makes sharing my albums a piece of cake. I just select any number of pictures, an album, or event, click the MobileMe button and it publishes the gallery just like that.  The same is true of iMovie and iWeb, although I don’t routinely use either of those programs so I can’t vouch for them personally.
6. Me.com
   I’m not personally a big user of the Me.com website, but it would be doing a great injustice to the service if I didn’t at least mention it.  Everything I’ve mentioned above is accessible from one central place at Me.com.  You can view your contacts, calendar events, galleries, and iDisk files from the rich web applications Apple has set up.  Everything is interactive and makes you feel like you’re on the desktop and if you’re not an iPhone user this would be the best way to access everything quickly and easily.
7. iPhone 3.0 Features
   Find My iPhone, by all accounts and measures, is an awesome service that lets you find your phone and even if you can’t locate it, you have the option to remote wipe it to clear all of your data if a less-than-honest individual was trying to access it from afar. The iDisk App isn’t available yet, but looks like a great way to access your files on the go, like a lite version of Back To My Mac aimed squarely at iPhone. I’m eagerly awaiting this to tie my digital lifestyle together just a tad more.

It’s not all butterflies and rainbows

There are definitely certain parts of MobileMe that are lacking.  The one major sticking point I have is the speed of the iDisk when transferring files thru the Finder.  It mounts on your desktop just like a regular hard drive and by default mirrors the folder structure of your home directory (Pictures, Movies, Music, Documents, Sites, etc). This makes it easy for newcomers to understand how to move files to their iDisk, but the transfer speeds are attrocious.  For a standard video file of 100MB, I clocked my upload speeds thru the Finder at roughly 8kbps to 19kbps on my 16/2mbps cable connection.  Compare that to when connecting via FTP (any clients with WebDAV support are capable of this) with the same video file transferring at an average of 114kbps and you can understand why I’m a little baffled by this.

While on the subject of iDisk, another tiny problem I have is the lack of options for adding more storage space. By and large, most users won’t ever have to worry about hitting the 20GB ceiling, but for someone like me who stands to benefit from storing uncompressed video files or moving large amounts of music to and from my iDisk for safe keeping, the option to purchase additional space by the 10’s of gigabytes as opposed to a system like Amazon’s S3 where you only pay for what you use seems teensy bit archaic.

My only other gripe is that I’m not crazy about having to use iWeb to create a webpage on my allocated web space.  Beings that I’m a designer/coder by trade, I’m curious to see how fast an Apple server would load my pages to the masses and don’t really want to use a WYSIWYG editor to test that curiosity.

In Summary

If you’re an Apple computer user and have an iPhone, then MobileMe is really a no brainer.  For $99 a year, you get the convenience of, well, everything… everywhere.  Access your contacts, calendars, mail and more from a variety of platforms and programs.  Serve pictures and videos attractively from the MobileMe Gallery. Store and access your files on “the cloud” or just get them directly using Back To My Mac.  Despite the one or two complaints I have, they’re certainly not enough to outweigh all of the convenience and ease of use MobileMe has provided me for the past three months.