Is MobileMe Worth the Money?

by Claire J Rottenberg
CJRTOOLS ebooks

If you’re not a subscriber to Apple’s online service, MobileMe, you might be wondering if the service would be right for you. Or maybe you are a subscriber and you’re not sure if you should renew your subscription. In this article, I briefly describe the main MobileMe services so you can decide if the service is worth the cost.

Syncing Feature

Apple has emphasized the syncing capabilities of MobileMe as the central element of the service. The syncing feature of MobileMe is easy to use and can be set to sync your computers and iPhone or iPod Touch to the online MobileMe application. You can sync your email accounts and messages, Address Book contacts, Safari bookmarks, and iCal calendars. Some third party applications may also let you sync data from them. Syncing can be automatic so that every time you make a change on your computer, the change will be automatically synced with the online MobileMe service or, if you prefer, you can manually sync your data by accessing an option from the Mac OS X menu bar. Although syncing does not work quite as quickly or smoothly as Apple first stated it would, it does work well for most setups.

Email Service

The MobileMe package includes an excellent IMAP email service. Although the new email account name (yourname@me.com) is not pleasing to all users, the service has advantages over other email services. I have several email accounts, including a Gmail account, and the MobileMe email service uses spam filtering that is far superior to that of other accounts. Unlike some other accounts that place all spam in a junk mailbox, MobileMe filters out the spam before it ever reaches your mailbox so very little junk mail actually gets to you.

In addition to excellent spam filtering, the MobileMe email service provides you with an enormous amount of storage space so you can keep all of your email messages in one account. Also, since the account is an IMAP account, you can keep your online and offline mailboxes always in sync.

Online Storage

Another benefit of MobileMe is the 20 GB of online storage space that comes with the service. Because your MobileMe iDisk can be mounted on the desktop, you can add photos, music files, videos, and other files to the iDisk just as you would to any hard drive. In addition, the new online interface has an upload option that lets you add files to your iDisk from any computer. Now, with MobileMe, you can have a safe, offsite location for storing your important data.

Web Hosting

A MobileMe account has one more useful feature – a web hosting service with huge bandwidth limits (200 GB per month). Although Apple only advertises its hosting service in combination with Web Galleries and iWeb, you can, in fact, use any web design or development application with MobileMe. Publishing a website to your MobileMe account can be done from within some applications, such as RapidWeaver, or you can simply drag a website folder to either the Sites or Web folder on your iDisk to create an instant, live website. MobileMe’s web hosting service doesn’t provide all of the special features of most dedicated web hosting services, but it is more than adequate for many users’ needs. And the 20 GB of storage space plus the 200 GB of monthly bandwidth make it perfect for photo album sites that you might want to share with your friends or with the world.

Conclusion

Is MobileMe worth the money? If all you want is a syncing program or an email service or a web hosting service, MobileMe is probably not worth the expense. But, if you want or need two or more of the services provided, MobileMe is a good value. For $99 a year, you get the ability to sync data on all of your computers and your iPhone or iPod Touch, a good email service with excellent spam filtering, an easy-to-use hosting service, and enough offsite storage for your email, websites and important data.

* Note – Since MobileMe is a new service, it still has some bugs in it that Apple is working hard to resolve. For example, while working on this article, my email account on MobileMe became inaccessible for a short period of time. Hopefully, Apple will work out the bugs soon and MobileMe will be the smooth working service Apple has promised users.

Claire J Rottenberg is the author of Easy Guides to Mac OS X software (Safari, Mail, System Preferences, TextEdit) and Course Books on Mac OS X 10.5, iPhoto ’08, iTunes, and Mac OS X 10.4. More information on her books is available on the CJRTOOLS ebooks website (www.cjrtools.com/ebooks).