MobileMe - Why It Makes Me Angry And Hopeful

Apple's MobileMe is an innovative synchronization service that allows you to keep your bookmarks, emails, calendar, contacts and photos all up to date on all of your devices including your laptop, desktop and iPhone. This is a fantastic idea because I have wasted more hours than I can count getting all of my devices to sync up and "talk" to each other. I e-mail myself things instead of plugging in my phone to my laptop, because it takes too long. You get the picture.

So with MobileMe, I was pretty excited. It offered a convenient way to connect all of my junk (as I call it) and since I already had a .mac account, this was a no brainer. Of course when .mac switched to Mobile Me, all the images on my website disappeared, but that's an entirely different story...

Now that MobileMe is past its starting glitches, I'm disappointed. Sure, it looks great and the online photo gallery is intuitive, but in order to send your photos from your iPhone to MobileMe, it e-mails them to your online gallery! What the heck? How is this any better than manually e-mailing each photo to myself?

In all reality, MobileMe is like an online hard drive with a selection of your important information. Sure, my contacts may magically appear in there occasionally and my e-mails update surprisingly well, but it's just not what I expected. It's not a new, easier way to keep my junk together. When it does work, it's usually because I've been poking and prodding at it, and that, my friends is not automation. That is me wasting time again to get all of my information on all of my devices.

Despite all the things MobileMe doesn't do, I'm still hopeful of what it could do. The potential is there for great things. And though I'm not loving it at the moment, I'm excited for what's to come.