Evan Sims

A Week with MobileMe: Day Two

Day two of my week with mobileme challenge has begun…

Morning — MobileMe and I were off to bad start yesterday, and I can’t say this morning as been much better. I woke up to find a MobileMe pop-up on each of my systems, informing me that my trial had expired. Clearly this wasn’t the case, given that I have 59 days left of said trial. Attempting to sync manually didn’t resolve the issue, but a reboot appears to have done the trick.

I’m encountering two other rather obnoxious issues with Mail, as if the rest weren’t enough. It appears each time Mail does an AJAX refresh (every couple minutes, I think) it locks up Firefox for a good 20-30 seconds. At first I thought this might be an incompatibility with Firebug so I disabled it, but it hasn’t resolved the issue. I haven’t encountered this problem with any other site, let alone Gmail which works in a similar fashion in the backend.

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A Week with MobileMe: Day One

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.

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