MobileMe Offers Push For The Rest Of Us
As mentioned in Den Den's coverage of the keynote speech yesterday, Apple announced their new MobileMe service, aka Me.com. What is MobileMe, one might ask? In its basic form, MobileMe is Microsoft Exchange Server for the individual. In it's broader sense, MobileMe is a pretty intensive service that will help you stay organized and on top of your game in many aspects, whether you're a regular guy looking for your boyfriend's mother's email address, or an entrepreneur looking for that hot lead's phone number.
Me.com is also taking place of the previous .Mac service offered by Apple. While there where a few people that saw the benefit of .Mac, it never truly reached a large audience because the concept just didn't ring of niftiness with the general public. Me.com is an upgrade to .Mac, so all current .Mac users will automatically be rolled-over into MobileMe.
So why is this cool? Have you ever experienced the utter pain of trying to transfer your contacts in your phone to your computer, or vice versa? If you haven't, please remain innocent and spare yourself the aneurysm. But for those of you that have, I'm sure you can already see the appeal. What's more, MobileMe will offer push email services, sending newly received email to your phone and computer immediately, and allow you to save your photos from your phone directly to your computer (conversely, you can access photos from your computer on your phone). And to top that, the service can sync with your iPhone, your Mac computer and your Windows rig running Outlook.
You may be saying that this sounds an awful lot like the Blackberry your work gave you, and that it's kind of annoying to get those emails at home. I would counter with your boyfriend doesn't send less-than-clothed pics to your work email addy (at least I hope not), and it's important to get those right away so you know to head home immediately. Also, getting this kind of service on your personal accounts can be cost prohibitive but MobileMe is extremely reasonable at $99 a year.
I know, you're saying "Is this Apple-love I'm hearing from the notorious Windows fanboy Jesse James?" Well... yeah, kinda. Sorry, but you gotta give credit where it's due, and this is a great service for a great price, so I can't complain. In fact, this is one of the services that will most likely push me over the iPhone edge come July 11th when the new iPhone 3G launches. And the fact that it syncs with my Outlook makes me choke up just a little bit.
MobileMe will be launching alongside the iPhone 3G on July 11th, as I meantioned above. If you see me in line, make sure you don't tell Steve Balmer... he gets kinda angry when he gets egg in his face (figuratively and literally!)
Me.com [Me.com]
[via: Engadget]
Jesse James
Posted to Hot Stuff, In Your Pocket on 10 June 2008
· Comments (4)
Other stuff like this: .Mac, iPhone, iPhone 3G, Me.com, MobileMe, Push
Maybe it's just because I'm already a really satisfied .mac customer (which means I have a macintosh), but MobileMe doesn't seem like that much of an upgrade.
Okay, so there's the space increase. Well, I've had .mac for a couple of years now, and every year there's a space increase.
sync? Really? I have a not-very-feature-filled nokia phone. It's bluetooth. I set it up once to talk to the computer, after that, the sync application (which has been around since osx 10.0) puts my computer's contacts and calenders on my phone and my phone's contacts and calenders on my computer. Not very difficult. I don't even have to do anything.
Pictures? Same thing. There's this handy little application called "Digital Photos" that takes the photos from my phone. (To be honest, putting them on is a little more difficult, you have to use the bluetooth program, and it feels more like a windows application.)
The only really new thing here is push mail. And since I don't have a phone that supports it, (at least I don't think I have a phone that supports it), I'm not too worried about it, but I'm really happy for all of you that do and can finally get all of your email.
The nice thing is there is no more sync. When you add a contact, it's instantly added everywhere. No more waiting to get back to your computer to sync.
What'll be interesting to see is how nice this plays with Exchange servers. If I add a contact on my phone, will it show up on my home Address Book and my office Outlook at the same time?
@Ducky:
Yes indeed it will. They showed precisely that happening.
Assuming, of course, your work IT sets up your iPhone to access the Exchange Server, yeah, it'll be able to do that for ya