“‘Cloud computing’ is a white-hot buzzword these days. It basically means working with files and programs that reside on the Internet, beyond your company’s walls — out there in the ‘cloud,'” David Pogue repots for The New York Times. “Apple is the latest company to find a silver lining in the cloud. Its new MobileMe service ($100 a year) is an overhaul of a suite of Internet features that used to be called .Mac.”
Apple’s new MobileMe service “works by storing the master copy of [your e-mail, calendars, address books, Web bookmarks, passwords, and preferences] information in the cloud. Whenever your machines are online, they connect to the mother ship and update themselves. When you edit an address on your iPhone, you’ll find the same change in Address Book (on your Mac) and Outlook (on your PC). If you send an e-mail reply from your PC at the office, you’ll find it in your Sent Mail folder on the Mac at home,” Pogue reports.
“Once everything’s ready, the magic is impressive. Make a change on your Mac, watch it appear on your iPhone and your PC. Add a new friend to the address book in Outlook Express on your Windows XP machine, and watch it appear in Windows Contacts on your Vista PC. Change an appointment in iCal on the kitchen Mac, and know that it will wirelessly sprout onto your traveling spouse’s iPhone four states away. And your Web bookmarks are the same everywhere,” Pogue reports.
“On Macs, MobileMe can keep even more stuff synched, including your passwords and preference settings… [and] there’s a fourth place where you can work with your data: on the Web. At Me.com… There’s actually a lot more to MobileMe than sync, since it also retains most of the features of the old .Mac service,” Pogue reports.
“MobileMe is the usual Apple value proposition: you might be able to find less expensive versions of its features online — various sync, backup and file-transfer sites — but none have the integration, polish and automation of Apple’s offering. Besides, the MobileMe price isn’t bad: for $100 a year, you get 20 gigabytes of online storage; the family pack costs $150 and gives you five accounts (40 gigabytes of storage total),” Pogue reports.
Much more in the full review – recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Citymark” for the heads up.]
David Pogue is OK.
Gushing sycophant. Give me a Goatberg or Ars Technica review any day over this bootlick.
i’m just impressed he got MobileMe to actually work. its almost a week and counting and with two help sessions with apple support i still can’t get it to sync my contacts and calendars.
cupertino bitch slapped him for his dumbness on CNBC
I like praise for Apple but not at the hand of this tool
Go write another dumb book David
Who are you idiot trolls posting above here?
Pogue is a decent man and does not deserve your shitty insults.
And in case you hadn’t noticed he reflects the views of a growing population of Apple users who have much higher standards than users of other hardware and software….
49er press
Try iphone settings, then addresses, then advanced. Make sure the push is not manual but auto. Worked for me. Me is nice to use.
Pat
Has anyone had any luck with mobileme’s webmail? I can check email on my mac and connect to the mobileme email server’s via mail but I’m unable to check email remotely. I get “unauthorized” when I try to log in…I’ve even changed my password successfully to ensure that I am not mistyping it…
Me isn’t that impressive so far as I can tell. I don’t have an iPhone, or iPod Touch so maybe that’s the problem? I can’t access my e-mail from work as we (US Army) is still using IE 6. At home on Safari and Firefox the opening page is the e-mail page. Maybe I am missing something, but where is the ” wow cool” factor that about all of my Mac software has? (Before you flame, Mac user since 1994 OS 7.5 and OS X since 10.0)
When I read comments like “I heart Chrissy”s
and “sounds like”s, i go back and re-read them, using in my head the voice Conan does, when he does that nerd impression.
THAT is seriously funny.
Try it.
There are a few minor glitches, but I having it working fine on my MacBook Pro, Mac Pro and iPhone 3G. All are synced and working as I’d expect.
The only additional thing I’d like from this service is to be able to spoof my normal email account and so push it as well as my user@me.com mail, so when sending from my iPhone it’s sending out as me@mydomain.com.au
“Web bookmarks are the same everywhere,” Pogue reports.”
That was fast, some body was requesting this feature yesterday.. (lol)
I personally wouldn’t bother with MobileMe/.Mac for just me because I’d cobble together my own solution, since I’d be prepared to go to the extra little bit of effort. For a family pack I definitely think it’s worth it.
i’m just impressed he got MobileMe to actually work. its almost a week and counting and with two help sessions with apple support i still can’t get it to sync my contacts and calendars.
I just followed the online setup instructions and had no trouble. I was set up in about five minutes.
Don’t you just LOVE the internet, wherein an asswipe like “I heart Chrissy” can post his high and mighty opinions without so much as a single credential to support his assertion? We all know who David Pogue is, his curriculum vitae, his skill base, his reliability as a reviewer. He has most certainly earned our respect as a reviewer.
But just who the f*sck is “I heart Chrissy”? A moron with a keyboard, pounding away (yes, THAT way) in his mother’s basement, most likely. Ya’ know, it used to be the Colt .45 that was the Great Equalizer; now it’s a $300 PC from Walmart. I prefer the good old days.
Kinda agree with the early posters here.
To counter the negative accounts about MobileMe, I’m here to say that my experience with it has been so far, so good.
I have an iPhone, a MBP, and an iMac all synching just fine (address book, calendar, bookmarks, and all the rest).
My iPhone is set to automatically sync. My data on these three systems were so out of sync that several times the changes to one or the other were more than 5% and required my attention, but now that everything has been cleaned up, synching is working seamlessly.
It’s fun watching the web (me.com) address book update itself automagically in near real-time when I make a change on one of the computers.
I’d like to see calendar sharing improved. The read-only view is still stuck in the .Mac look-and-feel and since we have the family pack, I’d like to see shared read-write calendars for family members included.
Nice idea but I personally don’t like storing my personal data on someone else’s cloud. Now if they sold a MobileMe server application I could run from my hosted server that would be a different story.
@ Randian
Hear Hear!
Pogue’s fairness, reliability & professionalism has been proven a dozen times over. I don’t use .mac/mobileme, cause I’m a whimp and the idea of trusting my data to the cloud just doesn’t sit right with me, but I an certainly see the benefits. I don’t own an iPhone cause me & AT&T;are at odds over some billing issues & I won’t just simply give the $600.00 for their bogus billing… but I sure wish I did.
Thanx
Dave
@t your issue:
“Has anyone had any luck with mobileme’s webmail? I can check email on my mac and connect to the mobileme email server’s via mail but I’m unable to check email remotely. I get “unauthorized” when I try to log in…I’ve even changed my password successfully to ensure that I am not mistyping it…”
Working great from day 1. Had an issue at the beginning. Didn’t set the MMe prefs properly.
Been fooling around this morning trying to reactivate a script that I was working on yesterday to auto open and set my username/password for my MobileMe account.
So I just ‘reset’ Safari and voila, everything is back to normal, if not significantly faster.
@t
I forgot to add, I got the “unauthorized” this morning after “fooling around this morning, thus the ‘reset’.
@DanielM, first thanks for responding…I know this is not a tech forum…I figure with all the mac users out there someone has run across this issue…
I usually use Firefox – I downloaded and installed safari at work and reset it after several failed login attempts. I have a stupid question what / where is the MMe prefs? I suspect that is the issue..
yo t
……”installed safari at work………..”
If I am to assume your talking about a Windoz PC I think MMe prefs can be found (I don’t have my laptop with me) in
Start | Control Panel.
Maybe I’m dreaming again.
Hey, Pogue, go stick (it to Microsoft…..)
@t
The MobileMe prefs is in the INTERNET & NETWORK group of the SYSTEM PREFERENCES pane.
Good luck.
@DanielM & Banjo
Guys – thanks for your help – I am using windos at work. Don’t see it under control panel – very frustrating…oh well…