Berticus’ Life & Times

Earlier this month, while on vacation of all times, my free year of MobileMe expired. Immediately and without warning my me.com email, which I never used, began spitting errors out every five minutes. My photos were locked and completely inaccessible. Like poor Beloki in the 2003 Tour de France, my online presence was shattered.

Thus the question: is it worth $100 for Apple’s cloud services? I found my “trial” year earned simply by working for AT&T to be pretty informative in the face of said question. MobileMe is roughly equal to Google Sync in terms of basic services rendered: your calendars will sync in real time, contacts will be backed up and synced, and email will have some exchange-like features such as detailed contact information and a different style of pushing.

Essentially, Apple offers two things I like that Google doesn’t: A button within the photo app to automatically send to MobileMe and Find my iPhone, or device GPS tracking. The button, along with the policy of locking you out from your data, is anti-trust-like and cheating, so even if convenient I make it a non-issue in protest and adapt to Picasa via iPhone. Find my iPhone is genuinely valuable, but just not worth $100.

MobileMe is Apple’s worst product by far. Even Apple TV has a decent value proposition in a market where no set top boxes are really fantastic. But the value proposition of a pay-only, walled off service that probably derives an appreciable fraction of its sales from people desperate to recover their data and credit-card-requiring-trial users who forget to cancel, especially with amazing free alternatives available, is nil to me.

Let’s hope the rumors are true and Apple either implements a free level of Me service or just makes it free outright. Personally though, I’ll already be used to Google Sync.