Filed under: MobileMe
Uncle Walt on MobileMe: Pass on it for now
MobileMe has been off to a rough start. The mail outages aren't good and giving people free time to use a service that doesn't work is a cold comfort. Sadly, the bad news just keeps coming for MobileMe.Walt Mossberg, Personal Technology columnist for the Wall Street Journal, is generally an Apple fan but he isn't gaga for MobileMe. Even discounting the amount of trouble Apple has been having keeping MobileMe up, Mossberg points out that even when fully functional the service doesn't work well.
He points out the push that isn't really push, the sluggishness of the web interface, and a host of issues with syncing data with Outlook on a PC. Walt suggests you wait before buying MobileMe.
How has MobileMe been treating you? Let us know in the comments.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
Steve said 1:15PM on 7-24-2008
MobileMe has been fine so far! And oh yeah, first!
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oZone said 8:31AM on 7-25-2008
Epic fail. Complete and utter fail.
Steve said 9:15PM on 7-25-2008
oh well!
Eric Vicenti said 1:10PM on 7-24-2008
I agree with Uncle Walt, its just not ready. The web interface is boggy and is absolutely littered with bugs. The most annoying part is the reluctance to push anything except emails. (And not even pushing emails to the computer) Even re-syncing doesn't always sync everything.
Apple better fix this scenario soon or else they are going to have a very unhappy user base. Loosing data is where it crosses the line, which has already happened to me on a few occasions.
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Chris Williams said 1:10PM on 7-24-2008
I dunno why everyone keeps knockin .me . I've had no trouble with it. Works flawlessly evertime. I use Mail.app on my Mac and everything syncs perfectly on my iphone in near real time (1-2 min delay tops). I can't speak to the web interface as I don't use it.
The only thing I've noticed is that occasionally my overnight backup jobs to my idisk fail (never happened with .mac - happened twice now with .me) but if I manually run them during the day it works fine. I'm just attributing this to Apple doing maintenance at night right now.
Otherwise, maybe I'm just lucky but I fail to see what aall the hubub is with .me
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Hobbes said 1:28PM on 7-24-2008
I guess that's because everybody else is having problems. You're one of the lucky ones. Let everybody else with issues raise them so we can have some hope Apple will get its act together and fix it.
.Mac users (I'm one of them) had no option with this transition other than suffer the constant outages, no answers from Apple's support and no idea when services will be normalized. For a paid service this is simply unacceptable.
My subscription is set to auto-renew tomorrow and I had to figure out by myself (with no help from Apple support) that I had to re-enter my credit card information using spaces between groups of 4 digits.
Biggest customer rip-off in my opinion.
What I don't understand is that I believe Apple has some brilliant people working for them. How comes this even happened in the first place?
eric f. said 11:01AM on 7-25-2008
Besides the outages, I'm another that hasn't had any problems with the service, or any push related issues to my original iPhone.
.Mac customer for years...
Guy said 5:57AM on 7-26-2008
"We Hate Apple's MobileMe" - new facebook group for everyone who is disappointed.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20973637842
Ryan Trevisol said 1:13PM on 7-24-2008
Yesterday I tried to sync one lousy contact from my mac to my phone, and though I hit sync manually about 10 times, it wasn't until 15 minutes later that it synced it. How do I know? Because it gave me that stupid confirmation dialog. Are you sure you want to sync this contact? No %&#(#ing kidding I want to sync it.
But wait, there's more. It's still not on my phone.
Push my foot. I could seriously do without MobileMe. What I'd really like is IMAP Idle for Gmail.
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thezonie said 1:23PM on 7-24-2008
I already filter all of my incoming mail through Gmail before forwarding them on to MobileMe for the iPhone push, so yeah, Gmail IMAP Idle would be great. :)
twoeightnine said 1:35PM on 7-24-2008
Trying "editing" the contact on your Mac. Hit the edit button, remove the last letter on the name and then type it back in. I had six contacts that weren't syncing but as soon as I did this to the first two all of them synced immediately.
kleinias said 1:36PM on 7-24-2008
I totally agree with you here. Since gmail is already IMAP Idle ready (as are countless other e-mail services) it would be really helpful if Apple would make the iPhone's e-mail application, IMAP Idle compliant. The chances of Apple doing this are slim though, as they want people to pay for MobileMe. I know large companies like Apple like to lock you in this way, but it's frustrating none the less.
aj_robins said 3:37PM on 7-24-2008
Unfortunately, gmail contacts have big problems, too: importing .csv from outlook doesn't seem to work (addresses get dropped), and exporting/importing google's own .csv format doesn't always work, either (imported contact appears to get corrupted if it has more than one IM name, or more than one of anything else -- e.g., more than one "work" email address, more than one "other" phone number, etc.).
Doug said 1:17PM on 7-24-2008
I am now 7 days without email. As a business owner who thrives on keeping in close contact with his clients, I am horrified at this debacle. And more so, the lack of communication from Apple.
I actually find all other aspects of MibileMe fine for my use. But no email and no contact or help from Apple has soured the whole deal for me. By the way, the "1%" of customers that have email outages, according to David Pogues site is "...at least 20,000 people" as there are 2 million mobileme subscribers.
20,000 + people experiencing the same problem and nothing more than an empty apology with a free 30 extension of a non-working service from Apple. THAT is a PR nightmare.
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jonathan ober said 1:19PM on 7-24-2008
no issues with .me cor me. I was a .mac user and the switchover was flawless for the update for myself...so yea, ive been hearing all these issues but not experiencing them myself. the extra time was bonus for me since I havent suffered through any of the migration. now i have contacts/calendars/mail on iphone, macbook pro and intel based imac 24".
Im wondering if those complaining didnt do the update yet...but even that was just to show mobileme icon in system prefs, iLife and a few other places.
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chris said 1:22PM on 7-24-2008
I just posted my review this morning:
http://theweeklyreview.ca/2008/07/24/living-in-the-cloud-first-impressions/
MobileMe is fine if you are on a Mac all day, with iPhone\Touch usage thrown in. But if you have to spend much time on the web interface, the trouble starts there.
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thezonie said 1:21PM on 7-24-2008
I'm enjoying push on my iPhone, but the lag involved when doing things on my Macs is just annoying.
Sometimes I want to add an event to iCal on my MacBook and then close it to go do something, but the event hasn't been pushed to the cloud yet, so it doesn't show up on my iPhone.
And the fact that I have to open Mail and click "Check Mail" after I hear my iPhone ding that a new mail has arrived just seems silly.
Once the Mac-to-Cloud lag has been reduced down to be as close to "push" as the iPhone-to-Cloud is, I'll be happy. But right now I want to do everything on my iPhone to guarantee that it actually gets up to the cloud without me having to sit around waiting for it.
It's just frustrating that sometimes I have to figure out why my two Macs, my iPhone, and the web interface are not all synced up yet. My experiences are not consistently as instant as the demos they did when they first introduced it back in June.
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Daniel said 1:22PM on 7-24-2008
I've been trying to use mobile me and it seems to work just fine on my iMac and my iPhone, but I've been having problems with it on my MacBook. It seems like every 30 minutes or so, I get the prompt that syncing will change more than 5% of my contacts (or calendar entries) and it is actually deleting all my contacts then re-adding them. I've tried turning off syncing and unregistering my MacBook from mobile me, but it doesn't seem to help. Right now my MacBook doesn't get much use, so it's not a big deal, but it is annoying.
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Lex said 1:26PM on 7-24-2008
I will agree. Mobile Me has has a terrible launch. I've had issues with mail being up and then down like a yo-yo. Apple does most things very well, this goes down as pretty much a failure...
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Justin Ritchie said 3:04PM on 7-24-2008
Apple was going to have success with MobileMe until they copied the Windows Me logo...
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