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