Some call it the Apple tax, but the idea of the Mobile Me service by Apple is quite good. But is it up to Apple standards?
Many people talk about Gmail as the answer to Apple’s Mobile Me service. They suggest Apple should make the service free to “compete” with Gmail. However, let’s keep things straight, Google gives away services so that you will use them and get your information. The more they know about you, the higher they can sell their adverts for. Apple is a media company selling hardware and software. They have just surpassed Microsoft in market cap (which is amazing when you compare numbers of employees).
Here’s our view on Mobile Me.
– As of Feb 2011, it is still buggy. The sync feature between Safari is not always good. In our case, it wiped all our bookmarks from all our Apple devices (good thing we learn to take backups at AINEO basic training first!).
-The email is very good against spam. They’ve done a good job here.
–Find My iPhone must be a nice feature, but we’ve not used it and it is now free. Tests were good. Although, you may have to ask your next door neighbor if you left your phone there if you are good friends and visit there often (not exactly to the house when we tested).
–The iWeb integration is great, but with WordPress out there why would you bother. You can get a site on AINEO Secure hosting for $15 a month with WordPress and update the thing from anywhere. iWeb makes a great looking website but forces you to use the same Mac for updates. Not exactly web 2.0.
–iDisk– Get idea but too blasted slow. If they could speed this up to match Sugarsync or Dropbox type services this would be a great reason to by the service all by itself. They introduced a caching feature (not related to ATMs guys) that helps this a bit as it keeps a local copy on your machine and syncs when you go on line.
–Gallery– Now if you are a Mac user, this is probably the best part of Mobile Me. You can easily upload pictures and albums of pics for grandparents to see those grandkids or the last vacation directly from iPhoto. Very slick.
Our conclusion is MobileMe is just too expensive right now. It has great potential but at the$100 price, it is probably a waste of money for most people. You can get packages on Amazon for about $60 a year or a discounted package when you buy Mac hardware at an Apple store.
What do you think?