Mobile me shutdown- tell me like I'm a five year old!

[Jfrost]

I'm running snow leopard, have an iphone 3GS and a mobileme account. Syncing between devices has been unstable for a while. I need contacts, calendars and my e-mail address- I've built a small business using them. My macbook is three years old and I don't want to upgrade either the machine or OS for another year or so. Please could someone tell me VERY SIMPLY what they think my options are.
Can I upgrade to icloud without Lion?
If I do, will ical , address book and mail work, or will I have to use contacts/calendar via web browser?
Will the phone still sync with contacts and calendar via push? Should I be considering a third party such as google?

Thanks Guys, I registered just to have this answered and I apologise if this is a bit of a theme at the minute!

 

[sandimacd]

Need Lion to upgrade

No, you cannot use iCloud to sync everything in using Snow Leopard. I have the same set up with 3 yr old Macs. I use @me.com for Apple stuff and use Google for my calendar, address, email, photos, etc. I do not plan on upgrading to 10.7 or 10.8.
I am not trusting where Apple is going so will hold back another few years. For now I am pleased with Googles sync services.

 

[r0k]

There are workarounds for getting iCloud email on an OS older than 10.7. There are even ways to sync calendar but not contacts (that I know of).

Another alternative is gmail. I would say gmail and iCloud are the only 2 email providers worth considering right now. I find yahoo, hotmail and the rest to be way behind in terms of features. One thing to consider is that Apple will offer human assistance if you ever have a problem. I had problems with gmail on 2 occasions and I was forced to deal with clueless bots and I found there was no phone or email support available to me at the time. This cemented my preference for mobile me and I never looked back.

There were rumors that Apple would relent and allow iCloud with 10.6.9 or whatever but those rumors seemed to fade out late last summer.

You must upgrade to iCloud to keep your mobile me account. This does not mean you must upgrade to Lion. I suggest you consider upgrading to Lion as I find the iCloud sync to be faster than mobile me sync was and the basic 5 GB storage account is free. In your case, as a mobile me subscriber, I believe you might get a free 25 GB iCloud account.

The down side of Lion is that many users report slowness compared to Snow Leopard but I've heard a clean install cures many of these ills. I just picked up a new (refurb) Mac that came with SL and it runs circles around my system running Lion so I'm thinking of trying a clean install myself.

 

[sandimacd]

SL vs Lion

Many folks, like me tried a clean install and it didnt work any better. You can get lots of info here:
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?p=14325656#post14325656
I love my SL and won't go back. I am not getting any better Apple support than Gmail support- which is why I am using this forum instead of a person at Apple.
Each of us do things that work for us. Apple changed and told me to figure out how to replace Mobile Me. I selected Gmail. For photos I use Smug Mug. So far so good.