I think it is because I have an iPhone that I have an affinity for Apple’s MobileMe service. Don’t get me wrong, it is useful and overly expensive. I could just use Google services exclusively and save the money. But there is something about the quick and easy syncing from my iPhone to MobileMe’s servers to my computer. Everything just works right.
But that $99 annual cost hurts me in my wallet. Yet, last week, I signed up for another year.
For a month prior to my renewal date, I went back and forth as to whether to renew or save the money. I even wrote up one of those “pros and cons” lists, and to my surprise, the cons outnumbered the pros. For example, in the cons category:
1. The MobileMe web service is terribly slow. Opening email is painful slow and clunky. And it doesn’t “push” email in a real sense — if I work on email online, the changes are NEVER pushed to my iPhone. Every time I delete or put email in folders online, I have to turn on my phone, click into my MobileMe email account and virtually wait for the changes to take effect. I don’t have this problem with either Google’s Gmail or Yahoo! Mail.
Also, the calendar is slow. Every time I try to enter a new appointment on the calendar is worse that slow – it is, at times, virtually impossible. When I try to create a new appointment in the calendar interface, half the time, the dialogue box doesn’t open. Instead, it places a “New event” notification on the calendar; but it doesn’t let me change what that “New event” actually is!! And the iDisk (the 20GB online cloud service), it drives me nutty since it is slow to open and slow to accomplish a task.
2. What the heck is with the “To Do” bar in MobileMe? It is not accessible via the iPhone, thus making them useless.
3. It costs $99 a year.
4. Google has email (which I use almost exclusively due to the clunky MobileMe email experience), calendar, tasks, documents, and file storage (via Gmail) all for free. Their interface is clean, easy to use, and does sync with the iPhone (after a little work with a third party application).
And for the pros:
1. It makes life with the iPhone easy.
2. I like MobileMe contact management better than Google’s system.
3. I hope that Apple fixes this system … soon.
Yes, only a crazy person would spend $99 for aggravation and stress. Yet, I did just that last week.
My hope is that Apple fixes up the web interface for MobileMe, maybe add the use of iWork (word processing and document production application) online, and maybe add a little bit to the storage limit (20GB is fine, but if they bumped it up a bit, I would use it more). In the end, I would be so grateful if they make their web interface less clunky.
Please.
