Apple MobileMe Review & First Experience

As many other Apple fans, I eagerly awaited the release of the MobileMe service, which was scheduled to go live on July 11th.

For those not "in the know," the MobileMe service from Apple, in their words, is "Exchange for the rest of us."  Here is a short list of the features that the MobileMe service promised to users:

• Data "pushed" to your PC, Mac, or iPhone
• Full suite of versatile online apps, including Mail, Photo Gallery, and more
• Expanded 20GB Storage and online iDisk access
• Back to my Mac service, allowing you to access any Mac computer you own remotely
• Syncing of other Mac services, including bookmarks, notes, Dashboard widgets, and more 

Now, I'd like to give my two cents on MobileMe.  A little backstory first, though - I've been a Mac user for about 5 years now and have loved it.  However, I always had to work on PC's (until more recently) and became addicted to Exchange and it's instant syncing ability between my Windows Mobile phone, work PC, and home PC.  Switching to Mac made me really miss these features, so naturally I was stoked for the release of MobileMe. 

First Login and the Mail Web Application

When you first log in, you are given the option of taking a quick tutorial.  If you are completely new to web applications, I would suggest that you take the tutorial, although for most it will cover the obvious.

Here is the initial screen you are brought to when you log in:

You are brought to the Mail screen first, which looks very similar to the Mac Mail application, or Thunderbird on Windows, and functions in almost the same way.  Cue familiar, fuzzy feelings!  It uses an efficient, easily understood three pane view (folders and accounts on the left, emails on the top, and the content of each email on the bottom.)

One very unique feature of the Mail client is the "Quick Reply" feature, which is new in MobileMe. Clicking the small "Reply" button next to individual emails allows you to type a quick reply to that person, rather than having to open the email individually or move to a separate screen.  Nice!  It felt very Twitter-ish to me and is certainly a neat feature.

I felt that the Mail application worked smoothly and quickly and will be a familiar experience to most.  You also have the ability to add other POP accounts to your Mail.

Using the navigation bar, displayed above, you can navigate through the different panes of MobileMe.  We'll be moving to the Address Book next.

Address Book

The address book in MobileMe works exactly as described, and mirrors the interface of the Mac OS Address Book.  It will sync your contacts from a Mac or PC and list them here.  Again, I found this interface to work smoothly and exactly as described, and there's not much to detail here.

Calendar

The Calendar web application surprised me with its flexibility and ease of use... and that's coming from an obsessive event starting, phone dinging, Post-It note addicted organization freak!  Again, it mirrors the Mac application iCal, and works in almost exactly the same way.  Creating an appointment is as easy as clicking and dragging (to reflect how long the appointment runs for) and typing in the information needed.

As you can see, you can have multiple calendars, represented by different colors, and choose which ones you'd like to display on the main screen.  You can change which view of your calendar that you'd like to see using the control buttons at the top of the screen.  Here, I have created a test event.

Contained within the event dialog box are all the standard options that you need to create a calendar event, including the event duration, which calendar it should be located in, and other parameters.

My experience with the MobileMe Calendar was pleasant and smooth like a fine web app should be.  What impressed me most is that within one minute or so of adding my test event into the MobileMe web application, it populated into iCal on my MacBook (see above photo.)  Within moments after that, it populated on my iPhone.  Sweet!  I like instant gratification.

Photo Gallery

In my opinion, the Photo Gallery is the coolest feature of MobileMe - not only the web app for subscribers, but the gallery that is viewable by others as well.

Here is the main screen for the web application.  This screen allows you to move through your albums and view the photos in each.  It is surprisingly fast (although there are load times, of course) and the interface is slick and clean.  Double clicking on a photo brings up the zoomed in version:

You can also rotate the photos, drag photos to reorder them, and customize how you'd like to view them in the interface.  Galleries can be created either by uploading your albums directly through iPhoto or uploading through the web application itself.  In effect, it's a photo hosting and sharing solution all of its own.  You can customize whether the galleries can be viewed online by all others who travel to your public gallery URL, or if you'd like to password protect them, you have the ability to do so.

Frankly, I had been putting off any photo hosting or sharing solution for quite some time now, and have been very resistant simply because of the time it takes to coordinate them.  Now, though, all I have to do is organize my photos through iPhoto, and MobileMe does the rest.  I am very pleased with the Gallery feature of MobileMe and have had a lot of fun posting and sharing my pictures with my friends and family.  

iDisk Online Storage

With .Mac and now with MobileMe as well, every subscriber is given an iDisk, which is basically a WebDAV drive, that can be accessed from any computer.  Either on Mac or PC, you can have your iDisk show in the Explorer or Finder as another drive attached to your computer.  This makes it very simple to access your files from any PC, although it is slower than what you might be used to... sometimes a lot slower.

MobileMe also has a web application that you can use to access your iDisk.  It gives you control over your files just like your PC or Mac, and allows you to drag and drop files, create and delete directories, and so on and so on.  What's truly great about this feature is the ability for you to download a file from the web application interface onto any computer... effectively giving you the ability to access your files from anywhere.  I don't think I'll use this feature much myself, but for many it will be indispensable.

Conclusions, Gripes, and Praises

Overall, I would give MobileMe 4 out of 5 stars.  It provides an easy, slick, and highly customizable way to organize your life on the web.  Here's what I like best about MobileMe:

• Reasonably priced at $99.95/yr ($8.33 per month, about the same cost as my 5GB web hosting)
• Awesome photo sharing feature
• Virtually instant (but not quite push) syncing of calendar, mail, and contacts
• Slick and functional suite of web based applications
• Expanded 20GB storage 

Here's my list of gripes and suggested improvements:

• True, instant "Push" functionality
• Faster iDisk access... much faster, actually, would be nice
• Speed up the Calendar app as well
• Add more photo editing options to the Gallery web app (crop, adjustments, etc)
• Improve Dashboard 3rd party widget syncing

To sum it all up, if you're looking for an easy to use, well constructed, functional solution to sync your information between multiple PC's, MobileMe is an excellent solution.  It's priced affordably and is compatible with both Macs and PC's.  If you currently have access to Microsoft Exchange syncing, it might be hard to convince you to switch, but for "the rest of us," it's an elegant solution.