Apple’s MobileMe is looking rather smart. I’m particularly impressed with it.
Whether your an iPhone fanboy or a NokiaNob, you might like the idea of a fancy me.com email address.
Not many folk have noticed the potential as yet — since everyone and their dog hasn’t yet signed-up, there’s a heck of a lot of username availability. If you head over to www.me.com, you’ll find an option to sign-up for MobileMe (irrespective of whether you use an iPhone, or an Apple, in fact — although Firefox and Safari are recommended). Sign-up for a 60-day free trial — you do need to put in your credit card details — and you can most probably get the username of your choice.
Our Podcast Master, Ben Smith, was delighted to get bensmith at me.com (I think that’s what he chose). I managed to get ‘ewan’. Right on!
I've got mine. I just wish I could log into their website to try that side of it out! Sort it out, Apple! Other than that, iPhone and Mac syncing appears to be working well so far – I'm impressed!
Interesting! Seeing as they are transitioning all the .Mac addresses to Me.com I'm not sure how they are coping with this. I just grabbed a good username that wasn't available last week via mac.com so maybe they've had bit of a purge of dead addresses… I'm sure there couldn't have been many people left using Mac.com.
….Or maybe this is a cockup 🙂
Gmail still beats this hands-down though. If Google Apps for your domain did proper push email/contacts etc to the iPhone then it would be game over Microsoft and Apple.
Actually mobileme rolls forward from dotmac – all the former usernames under the dotmac service are still valid with either suffix (ie mac.com or me.com). Since dotmac was a paid for service also the number of subscribers has always been fairly low.
I wondered about that AJ. I never managed to get ewan, or any of the other
ones I tried registering on .mac — but they were free on .me!
Oh dear apple!
This is most definitely a cock up! It lets you register a name, but you then can't login with those details.
Even though I got the Welcome email it doesn't work. If you go to recover password you will see that in actual fact its someone elses security question!
Oh dear Apple. Looks like someone forgot to load in the .Mac used addresses into the username checking database! 🙂
Trouble is – How do I now cancel my Credit Card details out of that account!
so who's using ewan@mac.com and going to get a rude awakening then, when
they find they can't use ewan at me.com because I've got it?
I could never get my name @mac.com because someone else had it, but I was able to get it @me.com
It may be because @mac.com's user might have been a trial account, which had never been upgraded to a full account?
Good point, Simon!
Wow – that is amazing. I am going to try – thanks for the tip.
Every success AJ, let me know how you get on?
Well I defo can't get into my username even though I have the sign-up confirmation email welcoming me to me.com
Something screwy is defo going on!
I was going to write a post on this, but am a bit pushed for time… so a quick response. I *was* excited about it, 3 days of playing with it though and for the first time ever I'm going to have to say: It's really disappointing. An Apple product I don't love. Ouch.
In no particular order:
It's not 100% push – contacts and calendars from a Mac are synced every 15mins or an hour depending on which version of OS X you have.
It's dog slow.
I'm getting lots of errors.
Half my calendar disappeared overnight.
You can't specify a senders address other than a me.com one. Not even if you setup a personal domain.
The Mac application didn't create mail boxes automatically so I had to do it all manually.
Calendar doesn't sync subscribed iCal feeds.
I can't change the privacy controls on a photo album via the web interface.
The e-mail address to send photos to doesn't display via the web interface when I turned that feature on.
iDisk is missing all the sharing controls and the public interface is still branded .mac and is broken (can't download public files).
There's no preview of media files like pictures or video / audio via the web interface (private or public).
There's lots of complaints on the support forum about Outlook sync.
It doesn't work fully with IE7 although that was featured in the promotional material.
You need a credit card to trial it.
My credit card has had
Oh yeah – check out my excellent default 'personal domain' page: http://www.benjam.in/
Not broken at all… *bah*
Good domain name tho
🙂 Ta
Oh and to cap it all… it doesn't even attempt to work from IE6…
“Unsupported browser”
Sure, I'd love to use Firefox or Safari, but I can't… I'm at work on a corporate PC without the option of which browser to use… Just like loads of other people. OK, I can accept not getting the full-monty solution, but no lite-version / degraded version?
Really?
I have spend half an hour trying to work out whether I need this service…..I mean, I have it anyway cos I pay for .mac but frankly, I can do all of this using a combination of Google and Dropbox – this goes across my work PC, my work blackberry, my personal iPhone and all my macs with various email accounts.
Actually – due to this, I wont be renewing my .mac subscription..
All my info is accessible on all devices at all times….free.
So er….I wont be needing this. Good on ya for posting it tho Ew!
Oh and to cap it all… it doesn't even attempt to work from IE6…
“Unsupported browser”
Sure, I'd love to use Firefox or Safari, but I can't… I'm at work on a corporate PC without the option of which browser to use… Just like loads of other people. OK, I can accept not getting the full-monty solution, but no lite-version / degraded version?
Really?
I have spend half an hour trying to work out whether I need this service…..I mean, I have it anyway cos I pay for .mac but frankly, I can do all of this using a combination of Google and Dropbox – this goes across my work PC, my work blackberry, my personal iPhone and all my macs with various email accounts.
Actually – due to this, I wont be renewing my .mac subscription..
All my info is accessible on all devices at all times….free.
So er….I wont be needing this. Good on ya for posting it tho Ew!
Oh and to cap it all… it doesn't even attempt to work from IE6…
“Unsupported browser”
Sure, I'd love to use Firefox or Safari, but I can't… I'm at work on a corporate PC without the option of which browser to use… Just like loads of other people. OK, I can accept not getting the full-monty solution, but no lite-version / degraded version?
Really?
I have spend half an hour trying to work out whether I need this service…..I mean, I have it anyway cos I pay for .mac but frankly, I can do all of this using a combination of Google and Dropbox – this goes across my work PC, my work blackberry, my personal iPhone and all my macs with various email accounts.
Actually – due to this, I wont be renewing my .mac subscription..
All my info is accessible on all devices at all times….free.
So er….I wont be needing this. Good on ya for posting it tho Ew!