A Week with MobileMe: Final Day

As my seventh and final day in my one-week experiment with MobileMe draws to a close, I find myself wondering why Apple would have set themselves up for failure like this. My week using the service has been anything but pleasant, and in fact I’ve found it to be a huge hindrance in my day to day activities.

This isn’t to say I don’t think MobileMe is a great idea. I’m a big fan of synchronization between my machines, and if I can expand that to my phone or other devices then all the better. The fundamental concept of MobileMe is sound, and I think it’s an idea that’s long overdue. One, integrated solution for keeping all your important stuff synced up and working. Great. I love it. Just make it work, and if you’re going to charge me for it, make it work better than the free services already out there.

FailMe

I love the look of the web UI. It’s sleek and sexy, and it really looks like a desktop app being rendered inside your browser. With some fine tuning and elbow grease, I think Apple can certainly fix the issues it’s users a facing with it. It’s a new service, and bugs are to be expected; I just wish Apple would have spent a little less time making the UI pretty and a little more time adding useful features and making the ones already there, you know, work.

Another big concern I have with MobileMe is security. Nowhere on Apple’s site does it state how secure my data is in the cloud. Are they encrypting my bookmarks? How are they storing my settings? How about my mail? The fact that they don’t immediately recommend Outlook users enable SSL when they set up their account (as Gmail does) and the fact that the me.com web UI doesn’t support on HTTPS is truly frightening. iPhone and iPod Touch users aren’t able to tweak the security settings of their MobileMe configuration, so I question how secure that data is as it’s being passed over the airwaves as well.

Another issue that bugs me is Apple’s treating of Windows users as second class citizens. It markets MobileMe as a service perfect for Windows PCs, but it doesn’t bother to hook into any of the OS to really make it useful to us. We can’t set MobileMe Mail as our default email provider. We don’t get desktop mail notifications unless we use Outlook or another desktop email client, which kind of defeats the purpose of web mail. Don’t get me started on the fact that MobileMe syncs Internet Explorer bookmarks, but it’s web UI doesn’t support Internet Explorer; and the fact that they recommend Firefox instead, but it doesn’t sync Firefox bookmarks.

So; show-stopping UI bugs, lost mail, synchronization issues, an (apparent) lack of security, limited Windows functionality and no Firefox support. Needless to say, I’m so happy this challenge is over so I can go back to Gmail and Foxmarks.

Note: My Contacts list on my iPod Touch finally fixed itself today; I’m guessing Apple tracked down the issue and patched it in during maintenance last night.

I give MobileMe a very generous 2/5 —
Good idea, shit implementation. Give it a year or two to mature before even considering moving your data to it.

Update — So, just a note to those of you thinking about trying MobileMe as well, be warned that your contacts and calendars will be wiped from your iPod Touch or iPhone when you start your account, and again if you cancel it. No way to get them back. What’s more, unsubscribing from MobileMe completely wiped out all my music on my iPod for one final kick in the balls. It’s okay, I love to resync 7.5GB worth of music. Good times.

Read my thoughts from day one, two three, four, five, six or seven.

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