Is MobileMe worth it?

booyah1024

i'm trying to weigh up the pro's and con's of buying a mobileme subscription.

a little background.

i have a

iphone 32gig 3G S
iphone 8gig (used purely to test an app i'm going to write).

macbook black
vista machine
xp netbook.

i have three email addresses.

1 gmail
1 <MYNAME>@&lt;MYDOMAIN>.COM
1 college email.

at the moment the my domain email and college email go into my gmail.

i use gmail basically in the browser and on the iphone in IMAP mode.

so that's what i have.

so is there anything bar remote wipe / locate my iphone / 20gigs of web space / @me.com address that makes MobileMe worth it?

also i'm in the states at the moment so can avail of the currency rate favouring.

Dr.Sanchez

Although I don't have a subscription myself, a few friends of mine with more then one laptop/desktop find it brilliant. I like the idea that it keeps everything in sync e.g If you enter a contact in your iPhone it'll sync straight to your 3 machines.

The 20GB of space is handy if you need to send someone a file thats too large for email. Just upload it to the iDisk, send your friend the link to it, and then he/she can download it straight from your iDisk, simple as! You can even password protect it so nobody else can download it except him/her.

Besides, they offer you a 60 day trial before you have to pay anything!

bluemachaveli

I have a subscription.

I have as follows.

MacBook Pro
Windows Machine
Windows Laptop
iPhone 3G

I find it brilliant. All my contacts & calenders are synced to all the computers, i can add a contact to my phone and its automatically sent to everything else. It wont make a huge difference for email, you will just get a @me.com address.

Bookmark syncing is my favorite though. I use Safari on all computers and always have my bookmarks in the same layout etc.

iDisk is handy and with the new free app for the iPhone you can view and email any of the files stored on it on the go!

Overall, i love it!

Red Alert

I used to use it but there's a few gotchas:

Although you can host your own web site with your domain email address, you can't host your yourname@yourname.com on it.

iDisk is quite slow compared to other WebDAV-based solutions.

Web apps don't have any 'lite mode' to work in IE6, which is a pain if you're somewhere like a hotel that only has IE6 and you can't run firefox.

Find my iPhone is good!

There's no Linux sync client, and it won't sync Firefox bookmarks. I had to use Foxmarks anyway to sync my linux box at work.

Calendar sync is fine.

In short, I can't really justify the price for it anymore. If I had the cash I'd probably go for a hosted MS exchange solution instead.

Narcissus

If you get an email to your @me email address does it push the mail to your iphone like a text message?

Just curious as using gmail at the moment on the iphone.

Red Alert

It just means it'll appear instantly on your iPhone when you get the email. It doesn't pop a dialog box or anything though.

Narcissus

Is there a way to let you know a mail has been received without having to have fetch turned on?

chrislad

I think it's worthwhile. I have an iMac, Macbook and two iPhones (myself and the missus), and they both sync and work perfectly. The convenience of it automatically syncing any contact I add to both the me.com site and my iMac is worth it, to be honest. Once I start using the new iDisk app for the iPhone, I can see that being a massive benefit too.

thecommander

Don't have a ME account, but I use Dropbox across my machines to sync stuff.

I have 2 mail address that forward to Gmail which is setup on 2 Mac and an iPhone. They use IMAP so all folders sync.

Google calender syncs aswell across machines & iPhone too.

Between dropbox & gmail/gcalender it seems to do everything ME does.

gorevs

i have an imac, air and an iphone and it does work very well re synching contacts and calenders etc. am by no means a technophobe but like pretty much the majority of stuff on os x, - it just works and is easy to use. yes there is a premium for it but it is quite reliable now and havent had any issues with it in a long time - it was poor when launched originally but i think that they have it pretty sorted now, and having the app for the iphone now will make things easy as well for accessing idisk if required.

randombar

Ya I dunno is it worth it to be honest, I've google calendar, and gmail accounts and they all synch pretty well. I guess I sync the iphone to the comp nearly every day so there's no worries. It would have been great if I could have synched iphoto and a few more things between computers but it's only basically for contacts and calendar so meh

chrislad

You can use iDisk now to look at photos you've synced to MobileMe.

randombar

Ya that's the same as facebook basically, which there's plugins for anyway. It's not really synching as such. That was basically the reason I got it in the first place so I could have backups of my photos and that on a few different comps etc. There really isn't much in mobile me that I can't get for free in other places. Won't be renewing I reckon!

uberwolf

I was coming on to ask this very question.

got my new samsung jet, have the itouch, and a dying mac.

First ambition is to get calendars working - google cal could be used instead, although I'm infrequently on wifi during the day, so I'll have to look into it's offline capacity.

Contacts would be nice.

Photo's - meh.

Files - not a requirement for me presently.

booyah1024

thanks all, made my mind up and decided against it.

i'll spend my $99 on something else in the apple store

pvik00

booyah1024 wrote: »

thanks all, made my mind up and decided against it.

i'll spend my $99 on something else in the apple store

+1, wise decision!