Thinking about switching over to MobileMe? I’ve been pondering the logistics of moving all my stuff over to MobileMe since they announced the service, and today I decided to give it a try. I’m committing myself to a one-week challenge with this, and I’ll chronicle my ups and downs on this blog as I use the service exclusively for email, contacts and calendar.
I’ll play with the file hosting, but it’s unlikely I’ll touch the photo or bookmark sync; for photos I already have SmugMug and Flickr and am very happy with both, and unfortunately MobileMe does not support bookmarking syncing for Firefox, so I’ll continue to use the excellent Foxmarks extention for that.
My Configuration
I will not be testing this on my Macs; I consider the data on those systems too mission critical for an experiment like this. Instead, I’ll be using my Windows XP Desktop and Laptop. In the interests of fully testing the software in a Windows environment, I will likely load Vista in a virtual machine on my laptop to give the software a try in that environment. I won’t be picking up my iPhone 3G until next month at the earliest, so this experiment will be running on my iPod Touch instead. Touch users have the same experience as iPhone users for MobileMe, so you can interchange my experiences on the Touch with the iPhone.
The Format
I’ll make a new post each day, and will update that post continually with my discoveries and experiences with the service as I encounter them.
Day One Begins
Signed up for 60 day trial of MobileMe. Process was very simple, only a two pages and a few fields to fill in. Got the PCs, Mac and iPod Touch setup with the system in less than 5 minutes. First disappointment, they don’t support Firefox bookmark sync.
Finding it ironic that Apple doesn’t support Internet Explorer in the web UI, but they sync bookmarks for it. They recommend Firefox and Safari to users to visit the website using IE, but they don’t sync Firefox bookmarks. Very odd. I can only guess they didn’t have time to get support in with Firefox 3′s new bookmarking database (runs SQLite instead of the traditional bookmarks.html file.)
Update — I’ve setup my essential contacts, some work and school events in Calendar and set Gmail to forward mail to my Me account. Thoroughly disappointed that it doesn’t support importing of external contacts or calendars on any level. No iCal support? No Outlook/Gmail/Yahoo! contacts importing? I was hoping setting my iPod Touch to sync with MobileMe after I’d synced my Google Contacts to it would push those to Contacts, but it doesn’t. It erases them from the device before setting up MobileMe. Lame.
Update — Been trying to get MobileMe to interface with Gmail’s POP3 all afternoon, but to no avail. I’m guessing it doesn’t support SSL sessions. No advanced options to define ports, or security details for the external POP3 connection. Makes importing my Gmail email pretty much impossible.
Getting my inbox flooded with posts from discussions I follow. On Gmail I have a filter set to archive and tag these as “Lists”, so they have their own dedicated section of my mailbox and don’t junk up my inbox. Looking everywhere, but it appears MobileMe Mail doesn’t support any mail sorting rules. Even the abysmal web-based Outlook has rules!
Update — Sync service just died for ~an hour.
Update — iPod Touch appears to have had a sync issue with MobileMe. It duplicated every contact group… in a couple cases it tripled them. No way of deleting the groups off the Touch without restoring… not sure that would fix it. The Contacts groups appear normally in the Web UI. I don’t get it.
Update — The web UI is beautiful, and aside from some minor UI inconsistencies that can crop up (refreshing fixes them) it works very smoothly. Sent a couple test emails to myself to test things, and they weren’t kidding; mail hits the web inbox and my ipod touch instantly. “Ding!” says the iPod Touch on my table. Very impressive!
Read my thoughts from day one, two three, four, five, six or seven.
Tags: apple, experiment, mobileme, one week
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Just a quick note – it's not that MobileMe doesn't support Firefox bookmarks sync, it's the other way around. Apple provides an API for developers to sync data across the MobileMe service, but it's up to the software developers to actually set that up.As of now, the Mozilla folks haven't done this. Hopefully one day…
Yeah, not so much. MobileMe comes with Internet Explorer and Safari support out of the box. Microsoft didn't build support for MobileMe, Apple did. Firefox has a larger browser market share than Safari by a long stretch. It was foolish of Apple to not build support right in. Likewise, I could be wrong but I was under the impression that only the Mac MobileMe client had API support, and not the Windows version.