“iPhone 2.0 represents a strong upgrade for Apple. The disappointment among some people that more wasn’t announced says more about the unreasonable levels of high public expectation around Apple keynotes than it does about the product’s feature set,” Seb Janacek writes for Silicon.com.
“The strong emphasis on Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync also underlines the company’s focus on enterprise market and you can expect the device to be marketed at corporate users heavily in the coming months. In the UK, O2 has already announced business tariffs,” Janacek writes.
“Then there was the MobileMe announcement. The .Mac suite of services and software has long languished in Apple’s backwaters. The new suite comes to the fore and positions itself as the missing link between the company’s three pillars – or chair legs as Jobs described them – the Mac, music/iPod and iPhone,” Janacek writes.
“It’s Apple’s first big push towards cloud computing and, with the typical Apple focus on convergence and user experience, aims at making the three work together seamlessly,” Janacek writes. “As a six-year user of .Mac, the £79 hit on my credit card which goes through every October will suddenly result in a lot more return on investment.”
More in the full article here.
MobileMe synchronizes email, bookmarks, calendars, and address books across multiple computers.
.Mac has done this for years.
What’s new? The name.
There’s another entity in the game:
iPhone.
All these are now PUSH email/contact/…
not what you typically do as refresh every 5 seconds.
@Mac User, What is new is that alot of brain suppressed pc users are just finding out what we have all known for years.
Let the Bloodfest begin!!!!!!! Not that it hasn’t begun and already claimed lives….Business lives!!
one more entity:
PCs
@ Mac User
The difference is that MobileMe instantly pushes all revs to all machines. No more manual Sync. Plus the online versions of iCal, mail and address book are full fledged apps that behave like the dedicated apps on your local machines. If you haven’t already viewed the keynote, you should. It explains a lot and demonstrates just how slick MobileMe can be. I looking forward to it very much!
“Let the Bloodfest begin!!!!!!!”
Sounds like you’ve got quite a weekend planned.
Forget chair legs for heavens sakes – more like oxygen burning rocket engines…
It seems I’m not the only one seeing the potential benefits of MobileMe!
Push is new … not that I expect to be using it.
PC integration is improved … won’t be using that, either, but it’s nice.
Sync is automatic … like that!
iPhone integration is new … not that I’m switching to AT&T any time soon.
The two big marketing points here are with the Enterprise and with families who use both platforms.
In the Enterprise, there is significant interest in the iPhone and in linking it to the PC on the desk and/or at home – and the Mac at home?
Families who have PCs and either iPhones or Macs will also be tempted – more so, given the Family Pack.
We’re talking here of a potential multiple of twenty times the market size that .Mac had available. Most of whom would not be content to be identified with a “.Mac” domain. This year. Apple has yet to fully reap the value of iTunes/Windows and Safari/Windows, and MobileMe will have a smaller footprint still – but it will be a clincher.
For $99 a year it Mobile Me does no offer anything of value to me. I use my iPhone for my personal mail not work eMail and I don’t need my personal eMail “pushed” to me. It’s great for people who want it all with their work PC’s but at some point you have to ask yourself “do I really need my eMail pushed to me 24/7”?
If Apple were smart they would have offered it free to iPhone users and got AT&T;(or any mobile carrier) to pay them a few bucks a month for this “value-added” service. This is a great service and will hopefully be much more popular than .Mac, but it all depends on how this is sold to users. It should be offered with every iPhone buyer (perhaps with simple instructions as a removable app on the home page offering the 60 day trial) and thoroughly explained by the salesmen. Too bad Apple had to cede sales of the iPhone to the carriers.
I’m not concerned about email push; I get email frequently enough. But having my home, office, iPhone and my office assistant’s copies of my calendar and contacts list immediately updated and sync’d is fantastic. Knowing that my calendar on all my machines (including iPhone) reflects appointments my assistant has scheduled and social items my wife has scheduled is fantastic. Contacts is the same thing
There are many people that won’t need any of this, but even average families and small workgroups are going to be able to put MobileMe to great use.
Now they just need to make sure MobileMac is more reliable than .Mac. Really, it seems like Apple can’t keep .Mac’s email uptime over a month at a time [ignoring planned downtime].
@ Crazylegs
“If Apple were smart…”
Now, who are you and what’s your business background to say that Apple “IS” not smart? Surely you are smarter by suggesting anything that Apple would have never have though of before…right?
Come on, after all that Apple as done you still think that they did not think of offering it free or whatever else you suggest.
If they keep charging $99 a year, it’s because it’s the BEST thing to do for them. And who said that they will not lower the price or offer any other kind of special deal?
Wake up dude!
Gotta keep saying it: MobileMe is the worst name ever invented… except for Zune, which is even worse. The day Apple drops support for the mac.com domain is the day that I and thousands of other subscribers say sayonara. MobileMac would have been ok, but the “me” thing stinks to high heaven.
@alansky. Apple had to drop the mac from the name of the service since PC users will be buying it. Can’t you just see Joe six pack sayong no thanks to .mac for his iPod touch? I font have an Apple I use a regular computer. Like the name or not Apple had to change it
To not have to plug in any of our iPhones to the computer just to sync a change or two in the calendar or a new phone number from Address Book is worth the $0.27/day
My wife depends on the calendar in her phone these days more than iCal since they have been roughly sync’d. But, I’d add/change something at work that day, forget to plug-in and sync her phone that night b/c she doesn’t ever remember, and then the following day she’d schedule something or other thinking I was available. It has happened more than once. “Exchange for the rest of us” doesn’t even have to mean in a business setting.
Thank the maker that I get to use a Mac full-time at work, but if I had to use a pc for whatever reason, this would be a God send.
My dad (over 60) barely does any computing but after my mother
(slightly less than 60) got a Mac Book Air (my doing) and an iMac he’s thinking they are great, esp the screen on a 24″ iMac. In any case, his assistant is strapped to a PC but doesn’t want to learn something new to switch (whole other story b/c she could). I was going to have to set up a google calendar and their outlook sync on the asst’s machine, and then a paid sync program that syncs with google-cal on his mac end to sync g-cal and iCal and then .mac to sync across a home and office machine (for calendar and the other items) and then still figure out which one he’d plug his iPhone into (has been waiting for many of the rev2/3G features). As silly as the name is, MobileMe will solve all of that in one swoop.
There are other services that do this, but having a “drop box” to email large file links to a d’load server is really great. Any way you slice it, the ROI is certainly higher with the coming upgrades.