Apple: The Push and Pull of MobileMe

MobileMe as we are aware is a premium email service from Apple which has replaced the earlier .mac service or lets put it this way, MobileMe takes .mac service to the next level. With push notifications, it has been referred to as the Exchange for the rest of us. For those uninitiated, push email is a service that pushes the email to the email client the moment it arises at the server. This is a superior technology to the traditional pull email service where the email client has to manually check for the new mails at the server.

MobileMe was launched on July , the launch was delayed by more than 48 hours, poor Apple guys, they must have had the toughest times in their careers in setting up MobileMe cloud. The earlier .mac members were upgraded to MobileMe, subscribers now have @me.com with an alias @mac.com. jack@mac.com is same as jack@me.com as both point to the same account. The euphoria and the excitement was put to rest when subscribers started to experience sync problems. Calenders and Contacts were not being synced automatically, there were no push emails and boy, the problems continue till date...

Apple's image was badly tarnished and the customer friendly Apple announced 1 month free extension of the service to all of its customers. A week later Apple has further extended it by another 2 months. After having said all this lets now look into some of the problems I have encountered with MobileMe with Pros and Cons:

Pros:

• MobileMe has a really cool interface, thanks to the magic of AJAX.

• Any changes made to contacts, calenders will be reflected in all your Macs, iPhones and PCs.

• Dragging and droping of emails to folders is possible and gives you a desktop like interface.

• iDisk allows you to store and share your files with your friends and family.

• Photo Gallery allows you to share you sweet memories with your friends and famiily.

Cons:

• Most of the times the changes I made to the contacts and calenders were reflected but at times there were sync problems.

• Sending a file as an attachment via the web interface has not been possible to me even to this date.

• iDisk via finder is not responsive and uploading even smaller files takes a lot of time.

• No filers or rules for emails.

• Gmail beats mobileme hands down.

Having said all this, I still have faith in Apple and rest assured, these little problems with mobileme will be sorted in the next few weeks if not months. Good luck Steve... mobileme is good but as of now gmail is great :-)