mobileme and… me
“one bad apple [online service] don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl!” so, i decided to give mobileme a shot. i’ve got $300+ dollars in amazon gift certificates and they have been burning a hole in my virtual pocket, so having some of the cool features like “find my iphone” seemed like a good way to relieve myself of the burden. but thankfully i was smart and decided to use the 60-day free trial before taking the plunge. there are some things that are definitely making me hesitate spending $69 a year (amazon sells mobileme for $30 less than apple for some reason). here are my initial thoughts:
my setup
i have my macbook with me 80% of the time. i do everything on it: web browsing, chatting, email, programming, etc. the other 20% of the i have my iphone with me in case i need to do any of that stuff. so my biggest wants from mobileme are related the syncing of my macbook and iphone. if i had another mac or windows machine, or if i needed my data remotely accessible on the web, my wants/expectations might be quite different.
contact sync
slick. i love having my contacts consistent across both my mac and iphone. this is possible with google sync, but i really dislike how cludgy syncing between my mac’s address book and google contacts is. mismatched fields, random duplicates, and the weird all contacts vs my contacts things on google just turned me off to that solution. but despite how nice this is, i don’t really need it. i usually sync my iphone through itunes every one or two days for podcasts and application updates anyway, so its not a killer feature for me.
calendar sync
basically everything i said above but with calendars. syncing ical and google calendars is still a mess because apparently google and apple have different ideas on how webdav should work. i suppose i could shell out $40 for busycal, but it’s really not that big of a deal for me. last time i tried google sync, i had to consistently restart ical on my mac while trying to use webdav syncing with google calendars, and occasionally everything would just disappear from my iphone calendar. and the biggest thing that bugged me was not being able to select colors for calendars on my iphone. but once again, not a killer feature since i sync my iphone through itunes pretty often.
find my iphone
one of those features that isn’t useful until you really need it. some people consider $69 a year worth it just for this functionality. my poor graduate student self isn’t quite convinced of that.
photo galleries
flashy, though i already have a lot of time sunk into tagging, etc on flickr. though the $25 a year for flickr pro might be one bill i could eliminate if i use this instead… doesn’t seem to be a way to use those pictures in my blog posts however.
idisk
again, something i didn’t quite play around with enough, but i wasn’t impressed at first blush. my main comparison is dropbox, which is just seamless. when i first opened up my idisk, i felt a bit confused. i can understand the purpose of folders for pictures, music, and documents, but what about the library, backup, sites, and web folders (some of which are folder aliases)? what am i supposed to do with those? can i delete them if i don’t want them? and why does it ask me to enter a server password when i double click on the web folder? now i am sure i have the technical aptitude to figure this out, however i was just a bit turned off by it. in comparison, a dropbox starts with a pictures folder and a public folder, both with readme files explaining their functionality. in addition to this clunky beginning, i’ve read some horror stories about failed syncing, something that i would rather not care to deal with. i don’t need the backup functionality since i use mozy (i would have to pay some undisclosed amount to expand my idisk storage space to fit all of my data). lastly, dropbox just works on my mac, on my iphone, and is also very handy for transferring files to/from the windows xp virtual machine i occasionally have to boot up.
web publishing
mobileme lets me use my own domain name and i just got a new domain: iambismark.net (haven’t gotten it all hooked up correctly just yet..). however, my family still uses cpanra.org for other things (wiki, brother’s blog), so we would have to figure out what to do with that before i could stop paying for shared hosting. i didn’t really play with the web publishing on mobileme, but i have a feeling it doesn’t have php or mysql, so i couldn’t host my blog there. probably not a very useful feature for my needs.
now for the real deal breaker. first, let me say that i really do not like gmail all that much. i don’t like the webmail, and i hate hate hate the weird imap implementation. finally having a decent imap account was one of my main motivations for being interested in mobileme. but the biggest gotcha: no server-side mail rules. this is a big deal to someone like me who gets 20-30 emails a day from mailing lists. i don’t want these emails filling up my inbox, so on gmail, it was easy to set up rules to automatically label them and skip the inbox. unfortunately, mobileme doesn’t allow me to do this. i can set up a client-side rule in my mac’s mail.app to filter messages into the right folders, however the iphone has no such functionality. so if my macbook is not currently awake and connected to the internet, my iphone’s inbox will just fill up with every single email i receive. not what i want at all. gmail also has a handy feature of allowing you to change the sender field in your emails to other verified email addresses. mobileme’s smtp servers do not allow this (probably for spam-related reasons), though this isn’t a huge issue as i can just use a separate smtp server to send with other addresses (namely my school address). it would be a bit annoying to have to switch email account on my iphone just to send from another address, but not a huge thing. the lack of server-side rules however makes the email worthless to me. i spent most of last night trying to figure out some better way to deal with email (having gotten a taste of real imap). i’m actually considering paying for a fastmail.fm account. yes, i know paying for email service seems very foreign in this age of hotmail/gmail/yahoo, but fastmail.fm seems to just have the features i want. i can also use my own domain, which would be pretty sweet [update apparently gmail allows for this also]. $50 a year for server-side rules, storage comparable to gmail, non-cludgy imap, and my own domain address. i am tempted.
so, here is a break down of my two options:
contacts:
mobileme OTA sync or itunes wired sync
calendars:
mobileme OTA sync or itunes wired sync
find my iphone
mobileme vs nothing
photo sharing
mobileme galleries vs flickr pro (though mobileme would be losing functionality)
file sync
idisk vs dropbox (less space on dropbox, but i use <2gb as it is)
web publishing
not a factor since mobileme doesn’t have my needed features.
mobileme mail vs fastmail
price
$69 a year vs $25 + $50 = $75 i think $6 more a year is worth the server-side mail rules over the OTA contact/calendar sync and find my iphone. or i could just stick with free gmail. blech.