Mobile Me is Apple’s Exchange equivalent, provides push email, contacts, and calendar.
Works with a Mac, PC, and of course the iPhone. Wireless syncing is a go.
Supports Outlook on the PC, and everything on the Mac.
Has web based access to everything through Me.com. Web interface is amazingly slick, probably runs like crap on low-end DSL connections.
$99 a year for 20GB account, free trial available in July.
.Mac is being replaced.
Except it’s not.
It’s a nice thought that the revamp of .Mac will yield a brilliant and usable service to connect everything in your digital life, but the likelihood of that happening just isn’t very high.
Colin Pape of Seeking Alpha thinks that Mobile Me (or .Me as some are calling it) is going to be the magic bullet for Apple, and it will suddenly tie all their products together. I’m sure that’s what Apple is aiming for, but they’ve neglected .Mac for so long that I’m not sure an overhaul and a new name is going to be enough to breathe life into it.
On the other hand, some rumors suggest that Apple will be turning .Me over to Google for a portion of it’s revenue. Though with Steve’s ego, I find this hard to believe. It’s a nice idea though, imagine a Google run service that would allow for unlimited email/file storage and instant syncing of your contacts/calendar/photos/email/music from your phone (iPhone or Android) to the web, and your home or office computer.
While the promise of an easy solution all in one place is nice, why pay for it? Nothing .Mac currently offers is worth the yearly fee, you can easily find free or cheap alternatives to most everything it offers.
Only time will tell I suppose. I’d be more than happy to be wrong on this, the more innovative products and services Apple launches the better.
[ In the interest of full disclosure, I currently hold stock in Apple ]
Clues in the recent iPhone SDK point to a impedding name change for .Mac, and after further digging the consensus is that its new name will be “Mobile Me”. Okay, kinda lame…
Hopefully they can make up for their poor naming skills with a revamp of .Mac, maybe some nice upgrades so it doesn’t suck!