I ditched MobileMe.
I have been MobileMe user for nearly a decade, back to when it was .Mac. I put up with the $99/year in spite of the obvious lack of features. I guess I just liked having my email end in mac.com. Over time, the service has been vastly improved. There are a number of things I really like about MobileMe…I’m just not willing to pay for them anymore.
MobileMe does have the advantage of being exceptionally well integrated with the whole Mac experience. For the novice user, I’d still highly recommend MobileMe because it’s easy to set up and easy to maintain. It’s even easy to publish your own websites with iWeb. The ease of use is especially true for the new iPhone user and Mac switcher. I have, however, outgrown MobileMe. I’m going to tell you how, for the same $99/year I’ve replaced virtually every feature of MobileMe with something just as good or even better. There is only one feature I will be losing and I’m sad to lose it (on Dec 22nd, 2009), and that’s “Find my iPhone”, though I’m sure a 3rd party app will be available by the time my subscription ends.
FYI, I use the following computers/devices: 16GB iPhone 3G, Macbook Pro, MSI Wind Netbook with OSX, Lenovo Thinkpad T61 (Windows XP)
In a word…GMail. Seriously. Gmail is the best webmail..period! It supports checking multiple accounts, sending from other email addresses, server side rules/filters. Gmail.com has more features than you can shake a stick at, though I’m not sure why I’d shake a stick at anything. I can’t remember the last time I had a stick. You may never run out of storage either…all included for the low low price of NOTHING. I will miss MobileMe’s alias accounts and slightly prettier interface but Gmail server side rules is enough by itself to win me over. Besides you still can’t send from your alias accounts on the iPhone. Trust me…GMail.
Sync
Calendar and Address Book/Contacts
First and probably most important, at least to me as an iPhone user, was the contact and calendar syncing. MobileMe did this virtually flawlessly and allowed me to develop a work around at my company where we do not yet support iPhones. I was using MobileMe which synced with the iCal on my work computer which shared a calendar with Entourage which was on the Exchange server. Entourage <—> iCal <—> MobileMe <—> iPhone. It worked nicely.
For both contacts and calendars it was very easy to make the jump to Google. If you already have an Exchange account on your iPhone this won’t be for you as Google uses the Exchange protocol to keep your info in sync and the iPhone supports one Exchange account only. Keep in mind, that to do this you need a GMail account. It also works with Google Apps for business.
Contacts:
I want to preface by saying that this particular solution does not sync your Address Book across computers, it just moves it to GMail and allows it to sync with the iPhone. If you want your address book to sync across computers I recommend trying fruux, which I have heard good things about. It syncs Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks and Notes. Fruux however does not yet have an iPhone solution, which for me is crucial. Fruux is currently offered free and is in beta. Another option is SpanningSync which will keep Contacts and Calendars in sync with your Google account.
The first thing I did was export my address book for use with Google. To do this you need is a free program called Address Book to CSV. All this program does is export your Address Book in OSX, which uses vCards and exports to CSV, which GMail contacts uses. You can export the whole thing or select individual groups (playlists) you’ve made.
Once your contacts are imported into GMail contacts. You have to go through your Google contacts and make sure that any contacts that have mobile phones aren’t labeled as ‘Generic / Mobile’ or ‘Generic’. If the numbers are labeled as Generic they will not sync to the iPhone. So you basically need to go through and quality check your address book which admittedly kind of sucks.
For calendar syncing you have a number of options: Google now supports CalDAV, BusySync syncs your iCal to your Google Calendar and Spanning Sync which I mentioned above. CalDAV is free, BusySync is $25 and SpanningSync is $25 for one year or $65 for a lifetime. Your choice. Personally, I use BusySync. All of these are good options for Syncing your Calendar to Google.
Once you have synced your calendars and contacts to Google you can setup your iPhone.
iPhone Setup below directly from Google:
1. Open the Settings application on your device’s home screen.
2. Open Mail, Contacts, Calendars.
3. Tap Add Account….
4. Select Microsoft Exchange.
Enter Account Info
5. In the Email field, enter your full Google Account email address. If you use an @googlemail.com address, you may see an “Unable to verify certificate” warning when you proceed to the next step.
6. Leave the Domain field blank.
7. Enter your full Google Account email address as the Username.
8. Enter your Google Account password as the Password.
9. Tap Next at the top of your screen.
9a. Choose Accept if the Unable to Verfiy Certificate dialog appears.
10. A new Server field will appear. Enter m.google.com.
11. Press Next at the top of your screen again.
12. Select the Google services you want to sync. Currently only Contacts and Calendar are supported.
13. Unless you want to delete all the existing Contacts and Calendars on your phone, select the Keep on my iPhone option when prompted. This will also allow you to keep syncing with your computer via iTunes.
You’ve set up Google Sync for your iPhone. Synchronization will begin automatically if you have Push enabled on your phone. You can also open the Calendar or Contacts app and wait a few seconds to start a sync.
To choose what calendars you want to sync to your iPhone, go here http://m.google.com/sync from your iPhone.
Bookmarks
I replaced MobileMe’s bookmark sync with XMarks, formerly FoxMarks. Foxmarks has plugins for Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on PC and Safari and Firefox on Mac. XMarks has some premium features missing from MobileMe’s bookmark sync.
One thing is the ability to create different profiles. This gives you full control over which bookmarks are synced to which computers. This gives you the ability to keep personal bookmarks at home, but sync everything else with your work computer. You can even set up different bookmark toolbars for home and for work.
While there is a mobile view, XMarks does not have the exact iPhone functionality as MobileMe in that there is currently no over-the-air sync. I think this is a very small downside as I can navigate to mobile.xmarks.com to view my mobile profile.
iDisk and Keychain
I’m lumping these two categories together. You will see why.
The iDisk is the equivalent of your parents offering to buy you a car when you were a teenager. You’re thinking BMW, they’re thinking Clunker. The iDisk wrote checks that it’s usability couldn’t cash. Sure I’ve got 20GB of storage….it’s unbelievably slow and there’s no intuitive and easy way to synchronize across computers. For the first and only time, I quote Sarah Palin: “Thanks but no thanks for that bridge to nowhere.” What good is all that storage if transferring 12MB takes until next thursday? In all honesty the iDisk is the BIGGEST REASON why I’m ditching MobileMe. I’ve been waiting for years now, at $99/year for them to get it right, I’m over it! I put up with it because I didn’t know of anything better. No I know better, I use Dropbox. Dropbox is everything iDisk wishes it could be. I wrote about it before, check it out.
The keychain stores your passwords for various websites and allows you to automatically fill in the username and password. It comes in handy but isn’t very secure (comparatively) and the syncing across computers never worked properly for me. The reason I lumped the iDisk and Keychain together is that by using 1Password in place of the Keychain I can now sync my passwords across multiple Macs and protect them all with 1 strong password. I can do this because DropBox syncs your files across multiple computers. I simply point the 1Password database to my Dropbox on both computers and Voila, my passwords are in perfect sync. 1Password is $40 as a one time fee, and in my opinion well worth it. Did I mention they have an iphone app as well, so you can bring all of your passwords with you everywhere you go? It’s a great alternative to the faulty MobileMe option.
So let’s pause for a moment and compare the 2 options.
MobileMe – $99 / year
VS
Google – $0/year
Dropbox – $0/year (2GB) – $99/year (50GB)
1Password – $40 (one time fee)
XMarks – $0/year
*BusySync – $25 (one time fee) or *SpanningSync – $25/yr or $65 (one time fee)
So for a few upfront costs and the same annual cost of $99/year you could have 50GB of storage online that syncs across computers, an awesome password manager with iPhone support, multiple bookmark profile support, a sync-able password manager that actually works and the same calendar and contact syncing as MobileMe without a busted iDisk.
The final component is the Photo Gallery.
MobileMe has a decent Photo Gallery feature. It’s nicely designed but everyone else in the world is using either Flickr, Picasa or Facebook to share photos. I personally am fine with putting up the $25 for a Flickr Pro account but most people would be just fine with Picasa’s default storage or Flickr’s free account capped at 100MB/month. I recommend Flickr. t that point you are paying just a little more than MobileMe’s $99 but at least you’re getting ALL value instead of a nicely integrated system, beautifully designed and missing features.
The way I see it, MobileMe has until December 22nd to offer me a big discount and fix the iDisk, add server side rules and own up to their massive shortcomings that I helped finance for nearly a decade.
In the end, I hope this helped someone. Everything has been working fine for me since the switch.