Todd Mundt - Latest Comments in Mobile Me and the Cloud

Re: Mobile Me and the Cloud

matt — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:09:48 -0000

good, practical ways that mme will be helping folks in the work place. I think many business people need info like this to drive home how the iPhone is now poised to fit into the work place.

Re: Mobile Me and the Cloud

toddmundt — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:29:23 -0000

zz4j9m - there's a lot of chatter today about the possibility that AT&T will sell iPhones without activation. Erica Sadun has one of the better posts as TUAW: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/06/10/iphone-3g-may-be...

Re: Mobile Me and the Cloud

toddmundt — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:29:21 -0000

Rubin - glad the sync worked so well for you! It's always a different experience for everyone, but for every problem, there's also a satisfied customer.

You hit the nail on the head - .Mac has always had slim offerings in return for $99 a year. It will be interesting to see if Mac users think it has more value when it adds new features - assuming those features are great, and that's yet to be seen.

Re: Mobile Me and the Cloud

Rubin421 — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:58:50 -0000

Yeah I've been using it since day one. Works flawlessly for me.

I gotta say, I used to be a .Mac user for years, but I cut it off last year b/c I feel Google provides a better package—for free. MobileMe sure looks good, but I won't call it "cloud computing" until it includes an online office app.

Re: Mobile Me and the Cloud

toddmundt — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:55:17 -0000

Hey Rubin - have you been using the Google and Yahoo sync in 10.5.3? If so, how has it worked for you?

Re: Mobile Me and the Cloud

toddmundt — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:40:40 -0000

Thanks for the note, Rubin! Yes, the extra sync capability was added with 10.5.3, but as I noted in my post, it's been a messy experience for many because of the lack of control one has over exactly how the sync occurs.

You don't have to search that hard to discover all kinds of wild experiences when people checked the box and started syncing. In my instance, my 591 contacts on Address Book turned into 1207 contacts after sync - a wild orgy of duplicate and triplicate entries, and several contacts rejected because they shared a common email address.

Yes, we know why this happens, since Google's approach to contacts is different from Apple's. Yes, the duplicates are something you can fix, for the most part, using "merge duplicates" but to repeat what I wrote in my post: a mess - not the seamless experience one would want, if you could avoid it.

Syncing is really complicated. My hat off to companies like Spanning Sync and others that make syncing their core business.

Re: Mobile Me and the Cloud

Rubin421 — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:34:26 -0000

As far as contacts are concerned, Leopard (10.5.3) now syncs with Google and Yahoo's address books: http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/05/mac-os-x-...

Re: Mobile Me and the Cloud

toddmundt — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 10:52:30 -0000

Good questions! I'm not sure, but I think that will be harder to do. Apple and AT&T will do in-store activations this time around, rather than allowing at-home activates through iTunes. If this holds, I assume that it will be hard to buy the iPhone without going through activation on the spot. Others may correct me on this - please do!

As for the Touch prices - having another company (AT&T) subsidize the price of an Apple product does create a big crack in Apple's pricing structure for the iPod products. Apple may drop the price of the Touch this summer - or give the whole iPod line a price reduction - although I wonder if the price drop will be as significant (percentage-wise) as it was with the iPhone 3G.

Thanks!

Re: Mobile Me and the Cloud

zz4j9m — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 10:45:36 -0000

Am I right in thinking that with the new iPhone (which presumably is like its predecessors in having iPod capability) could be purchased and used exclusively as an iPod for something like $100 less than buying an iPod Touch? I may be missing something here.