"The hoopla around the Apple iPhone 3G launch has taken a lot of the thunder away from another major, though not completely unrelated, development at Apple: the unveiling of MobileMe. The reincarnation of Apple's .Mac online services is now available at $99 for individuals and $149 for a Family Pack. It's true that MobileMe does bring the new iPhone up to speed with push syncing for e-mail, contacts, and calendar as well as other features, but let's not forget .Mac's roots as a service for online storage, backup, e-mail, photo gallery, Web-page hosting, and remote control (Back to My Mac). In MobileMe, some of these latter features remain unchanged, and some disappear entirely," Michael Muchmore reports for PC Magazine.
"Note that I tested the service on the first day of availability, and I did run into the occasional snag... probably just a matter of Apple's servers settling in. In any case, access to mail and the other services seems entirely uninterrupted if you use the Mac desktop apps like Mail. Despite these birthing-pain issues, moving around the interface was quite snappy and desktop-like, thanks to its updated Web 2.0-style coding," Muchmore reports.
"The upshot is that iPhone and touch owners get more, but Web and desktop users get somewhat less. They do get slicker Web applications, drag-and-drop, and more powerful Web gallery options, but lose online site building and a few other crumbs," Muchmore reports.
"In the end, while, yes, you can get most of what MobileMe offers for free from Web services like box.net, Yahoo! Mail, and Picasa Web albums, [but] you can't get them all together in such a clean, elegant interface. And if you're an iPhone user or a user of Mac's excellent creativity apps like iWeb and iPhoto, the tight integration with the Mac makes MobileMe hard to beat," Muchmore reports.
Muchmore (ha, ha) in the full review here.
From : http://macdailynews.com/
