Mike Wilks' Blog

I’ve been using MobileMe for a while now and there is nothing really to say. It just works. Sure idisk is a bit slow but other than that I really have no complaints about it. Gallery is still incredibly cool, push mail works, contact syncing is good and I find myself increasingly using the online calendar which in turn means I use my iPhone calendar more.

I’ve been using MobileMe for a few days now and I have to say the experience has been pretty positive. I haven’t experienced the outages that seem to be affecting others and generally it has been pretty stable.

• Mail – I’ve had very little problem with Mail, I have noticed a couple of times that mails haven’t appeared until I’ve gone into Mail on the iPhone but Push seems to work the majority of the time.

• iDisk – Storage in the cloud is a fantastic idea and for me is the killer app of MobileMe. I am still not sure that I trust the security so I am TrueCrypting anything even remotely sensitive that I store there.

• Calendar – I am frustrated by the lack of products it will integrate with on the PC but overall the web interface is pretty good. The inability to add alerts to calendar entries via the web is annoying (but you can do it from the iPhone.)

• Gallery – Now this is a fantastic bonus, I didn’t expect to use this feature but I have. Gallery makes it so easy to upload photos that I have found myself creating web galleries of photos which I have always meant to upload but never got around to.

• Contacts – Not much to say about contacts other than Push works well. I have found myself using the website to add and edit comments just because I can type faster on the PC than on the iPhone.

MobileMe is not without a few bugs and quirks though:

• If you are editing a contact on the MobileMe website adding a URL doesn’t work unless you add another field first.
• Mails deleted on the iPhone still show on the webmail. The fix here is just to delete one of the phantom mails and it will sort itself out and remove all of the deleted ones.
• Push of mails doesn’t seem to work everytime but it might be my imagination.
• The trial is a great idea but there is no way to “upgrade” to the real thing without losing your trial days. This is not a major issue as the only thing missing on the trial are aliases.

I’ve been resisting signing up to MobileMe ever since it was announced. I tried to tell myself that I needed a Mac to get the most out of it and that I was perfectly happy with my push Yahoo account. After a brief foray into the Zimbra Yahoo Mail client and getting increasingly sick of the amount of spam my ten year old Yahoo account gets I decided to give MobileMe a try.

Pros:

• me.com push account is great (but then you can get free Yahoo accounts that do this).
• The website application is fantastic.
• iDisk is great when you use multiple machines, much cleaner than my previous solution of manually synching folders in LogMeIn.
• Gallery is an unexpected bonus, I never got around to installing ViewPics and the MobileMe Gallery was just easier.
• 20Gb storage and 200Gb transfer per month seems a reasonable starting point.

Cons:

• There is no synch with either Thunderbird (contacts) or Firefox (bookmarks). I wonder how many people have also installed Safari just to get a way of editing their iPhone bookmarks on their PC (I know I have).
• You can’t play around with the email alias functionality on the free trial. Also the wisdom according to google is that if you choose skip trial you just forfeit your free 60 days.

Really there is not much else wrong with it, sure iDisk is a little slow across the internet but that is to be expected. Even the obvious complaints about secure access are headed off by the IMAP and SMTP servers supporting SSL and TLS respectively. I suspect if I keep using this I may eventually move over to the other (Mac) side completely.

My Yahoo account has now been relegated to a third account alongside my new MobileMe address and my hosted mikewilks.com domain email. The problem with my Yahoo address is I can never ignore it completely, after 10 years there is bound to be some service that I have forgotten that is using it for password resets.