MobileMe, What It’s Cracked Up To Be?

Maybe.

I could leave my review at that to be honest. The beauty of Apple products to me is that I can rarely fault them, they work seamlessly and I feel that my money has been well spent. With MobileMe I CAN fault it, it DOESN’T work seamlessly and I DON’T feel that my money has been well spent (I’m on a trial, but I’ll talk about this in a bit).

First off, I’ll talk a bit about why I went for MobileMe. The main selling point for me was the ‘push’ features, and when they’re working, they’re great. I get an email, my iPhone ‘pongs’ delightfully within seconds and lets me keep up to date. I also thought the WebApps would be great for when I’m at uni, working on Uni PCs (which I do quite regularly).

I was so certain that MobileMe was the right service for me, and on that note I began transfering my whole Internet life over to my new @me.com email address from gmail (which I could never fault), it took forever! The first snag came when MobileMe was down for about two days after launch and getting my email became a very stressful process. Since then, the service has been working mainly fine until two days ago when I couldn’t reach my email for about 4 hours. This really bugged me because I was waiting on a very important email from someone who I had sold to on eBay the day before. I had ALWAYS been able to get my gMail, and for an email service to go down like this is just pure unacceptable. Even now, Apple says that 1% of users may be having problems getting their mail, it’s been almost a week since that message was posted – Apple, get yourself sorted out because you’re losing customers here!!!

I’ve found that Web Galleries and iDisk are features that I will rarely use and I’m now asking myself the question, Is it worth paying almost £50 per year for push email? I really like the push email, I REALLY do, but I find it totally unacceptable for my email to be unreachable. One thing is for certain, If I experience anymore email downtime for the remainder of my trial (which Apple have had no choice but to extend by two month because of the numerous problems), I won’t be paying for the service and I’ll have no other option that to sign up with another ‘push’ provider like Yahoo, or just wait until Google implement ‘push’ in gMail.

I really hate to say it, but MobileMe has disappointed me and I’m certain that the service isn’t worth £50 per year. It’s just a matter of whether Apple get their act together in time for the end of my trial as to whether I fork out some more money to ol’ Jobs for a ridiculously priced product.

On a final note, what the hell were Apple designers thinking……

Andrew Booth

iPhone 2.0

After what can only be described as a disastrous  launch for the 3G iPhone, I would now suspect that every iPhone customer has Apple’s latest 2.0 software (as well as some of Apple’s iPod Touch customers – I say ‘some’ because it costs £5.99).
I updated via the ‘leaked’ version a couple of days ago and I’ve had plenty of time to get to grips with the new software. What follows is a quick opinionated review using screenshots from my iPhone (press down the ‘home’ and ‘power on/off button’ simultaneously when on the screen you want to capture.)
The App store is great, but the problem at the moment is that a lot (the vast majority, at least for me) of the apps are useless.

To begin with, I downloaded almost every free app in the store to check them all out. Now, I have only three things installed; Super Monkey Ball, NetNewsWire and Shazam. I hope more apps are released soon because there is a slight sense of anti-climax for me, I’ve been looking forward to the App Store for a long time.

The new features allowing MobileMe to work with iPhones/iPod Touches is great and is working mostly well (I think the problems I am having are due to MobileMe’s downtime and not the 2.0 software. My new MobileMe account is pushing email to my iPhone almost instantaneously, as well as synching calendar events, contacts and bookmarks (I’ve turned this off, I want different bookmarks on my iPhone than on my computers). Another update is to the email application itself, the long awaited multi-edit feature is now availiable, allowing me to move more than one email at a time to different folders etc.

Strangely, the most previewed and possibly anticipated feature of 2.0 was the new calculator app, don’t ask me why.  I probably wont ever use these new scientific functions, but I suppose they’re nice to have. Plus it’s pretty cool to watch the transformation as you turn your iPhone around, can you get any more geeky!?

Super Monkey Ball
I love it. It’s awesome. The controls are fantastic, perhaps a little tricky to get the hang of but once you do, you realise why SEGA spent so much time developing for the iPhone platform. It’s such a great device for these little games. Graphics are much better than those on the Nintendo DS and comparable to those on the PSP. I’ll be downloading Crash Bandicoot racing next I think.

Shazam
Remember that app I blogged about a couple of months ago that identified songs by analysing the track and then sending it to ‘magic’ servers? Well, that’s what Shazam is for the iPhone (I beieve, due to the iPod Touch not having a microphone, that it is an iPhone only app). Hold the iPhone up to a music source, and it’ll send you back the name/artist and even album art and links to buy the song on the iTunes store as well as a Youtube link for the video. I’ve had so much fun with testing this app and found it to be much more effective than the app I reviewed a while back.

NetNewsWire
I hate NetNewsWire for the desktop, I find it much easier to check each webpage individually for my news. On the iPhone, this is obviously not as easy, especially when I’m trying to load up TUAW or Engadget (heavy pages) over an EDGE connection. Even using MobileSafari’s built in RSS reader isn’t a good experience. NetNewsWire for iPhone allows me to get headlines all in one place, from all my favourite sites and synched with NewsGator (should I ever grow to like the desktop app. Well worth a download if you’re a blog addict like me.

Remote
Does what it says on the tin. Allows my iPhone to act as a remote for any iTunes library on my wifi network. The first time round, a code needs granting by the iPhone in the case of each library you want to connect to, this is then entered into iTunes on your computer. Brilliant and simple app, perfect for when you want to change the music playing whilst not at your computer. It also works with AppleTV, which I don’t have, but that would be awesome!

Overall, I think the 2.O software update is well worth the price that iPod Touch users’ have to pay to upgrade. The App Store has great potential and the apps availiable are fantastic uses of the technology that comes with the iPhone.
When it comes to the iPhone 3G, I’m really not sure whether I want it or not yet. I know I don’t need it for any practical use, but still, I NEED it!!! When i find yourself ringing all stockists in the area to see if any are availiable, I guess I want it.
Andrew.

I’ll be blogging about my early experience of MobileMe in a few days time.