Why pay for MobileMe? I’ve read that on Twitter and Blogs and all manner of other places. I’ve decided to do a round up of my thoughts on this question based on my experience using both MobileMe (formerly .Mac) and Google’s various services. I am an iPhone user so I will mainly speak from that perspective. Overall, I’d say that the advantage of MobileMe over Google + 3rd party services is the ease of use and simplicity of it all. This does not make it inherently better, just better for some people. Especially people who are not so great with computers and don’t want to spend a lot of time.
I will go over several features:
Email, Contacts, Calendar, Online Storage, Photos, Bookmarks
First of all, let’s get Mail, Contacts and Calendars out of the way. Both Google and MobileMe have IMAP Email, Contact and Calendar syncing.
MobileMe – $99
Google – Free
I love my MobileMe subscription. I don’t love the $99 I pay for it, but I love it nontheless. However, if all you need is email, contact and calendar syncing, go with Google, it’s free and relatively easy to setup. See this page on how to setup your Google services to sync with your iPhone. Google does use Microsoft Exchange to sync contacts and calendars so if you already use a corporate account, you will be out of luck with Google.
There are several key differences between the services. MobileMe has Push email, Google does not. Google has Server-Side Rules, MobileMe does not. MobileMe gives you alias accounts. Both give you the ability to import from other email accounts. Both support IMAP and POP. Pros and Cons, each has them. The difference is you pay for MobileMe. I think that GMail is probably the superior email between the two if for no other reason than the server side rules, of which I use plenty.
Google Calendar shows only 1 calendar on your iPhone, while MobileMe supports multiple calendars so you can organize your events by category. I prefer MobileMe’s calendars.
Google Contacts is comparable to MobileMe with the exception that anyone you email in Gmail gets added to your Contacts on Google Contacts, I personally, don’t like this as I don’t always want that person I emailed once in my contacts. Otherwise they are fairly comparable in features.
As an iPhone user I really appreciate that my desktop bookmarks sync to Mobile Safari.
But what do you get when you pay for MobileMe. Well…
Storage
With MobileMe you also get iDisk, which is Apple’s online hard drive. Standard accounts get 20GB of storage (as of today 05/05/09). This hard drive is broken up in a similar structure as your Home folder on your Mac is organized. I will not preach that iDisk is amazing. It’s actually only “good” at best, however it is very useful and can be used for a variety of different things. Your iDisk is your storage for your photo galleries which you can publish. It is storage for your personal web hosting which you can easily publish to with iWeb or as a PC user you can just drag HTML into the ‘Web” folder on your iDisk.
It can be accessed from a Mac easily in the Finder and PC users simply need to download the iDisk Utility. Linux users can access the disk using a WebDav server. Ubuntu instructions here.
One big downside is that file transfer speeds are often slow, especially when uploading.
Google (currently) does not offer online storage like the iDisk. However, there are numerous other options that in conjunction with Google’s service should still cost considerably less than MobileMe. Some examples are box.net, iDrive, skydrive, divshare, dropsend, etc. Most have a free offering or a paid upgrade.
Next post: MobileMe -vs- Google (Picasa) Photo Storage