mazedlx.net

When Apple announced MobileMe as

The Exchange for the rest of us

they made a big mistake.

I signed up for a 60 day trial account (79 bucks per year is a lot of money and I don’t want to buy a pig in a poke) which got extended to 90 days due to Apple’s “we’re sorry for MobileMe being such a pain in the ass” apologies.

MobileMe’s speed is beneath contempt. When selecting all mails in my inbox and hitting the delete button it usually takes 5 seconds until the recent 25 mails moved to the trash. Same problem with the calendar. And with the iDisk. And I thought after the .mac debacle in Europe (availability below 75%, speed below 56k) Apple learned their lesson. For a 50kbyte Pages document it took me about 15 seconds to upload it to my iDisk (and my internet connection is far away from being slow) - when uploading from my Mac, when uploading directly via webinterface the speed is a bit better but still. Apple gets paid 100.000.000 bucks a year and seem to operate their servers with a modem.

It is not possible to send invitations from MobileMe to an iPhone or iPod touch - so why do they call it the Exchange for the rest of us. It is more like the Exchange that the rest of us never wanted.

Anyhow, I give Apple time until the end of my trial account to fix those problems, bugs and to add all those missing features (like push from my Mac to MobileMe, sophisticated appointment management, notes and tasks, sharing with iDisk etc). If all that fails my advice would be to stick with Google, Yahoo or Zimbra.

iPhone SDK was released yesterday, and will feature fully ActiveSync capabilities coming with firmware version 2.0. Wait a second, does that mean the iPhone can now be synced with Exchange over the air, and can now send and receive contacts, appointments and mails via push technology? Yes, it does. Well done, but I’ll receive my new Windows Mobile phone today, so no iPhone for me (for now).