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What is a good alternative to MobileMe?
- Thread starter macswitcha2
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Syncing calender, mail, and contacts between my iphone, macbook and iMac as well as the idisk features.
AFAIK it's the only system that will. Hosted Exchange can't sync the calendars or contacts yet. It will do mail though, on the flip side it can do the calendar and contacts on the iPhone.
Google can also sync calendar and contacts with the iPhone, it can have a CalDAV Account in calendar to sync" the calendar but no contacts sync. You do get third party apps (BusySync) but they cost almost as much as MobileMe does.
As for iDisk, you are then looking at another $5/£5 per month to get web hosting that has a WebDAV disk. Only problem with that, it's a true WebDAV disk and in my experience they can be unreliable. iDisk has iDisk sync which means the files are on the local disk as well as the cloud, these are then synced up when new files are added, modified or removed.
In a word no, not really. You will end up spending as much money as MobileMe costs from the likes of eBay or Amazon again getting all of the features provided.
Even then no services sync up preferences, dashboard widgets, keychains etc that MobileMe does!
I have MM, but my preferred and most-used method ATM (and MM will go when it is up) is nuevasync + gmail, google contacts, and google calendar ($25/yr) + dropbox or sugarsync. The nice part is that all of these work with my mac (two way gCal + iCal, contacts + addressbook, and mail + gmail) and with my blackberry (bb mail and googlesync). Dropbox / sugarsync for 2GB free and 10-20GB paid.
Works better than MM, IMO, since I use the BB too.
Works better than MM, IMO, since I use the BB too.
I don't think there is an alternative to MM... it's a must have if you have more than one device!! 
To me no replacement for MM. I tried a few others. The issue for me was i wanted to use my existing email acct. I wanted it pushed to my iphone, as well as show up on the Apple Mail client on my imac. The best option for that was MM. Plus if u look on ebay. you can find it for 60-70. making it comparable to the other in price.
For home and personal life, i use MM. It's great, and possibly the best online service i have ever used. For school, we have google's school system. It's like a limited version of a personal account, we can share docs, collaborate on work email and create private websites for school subjects.
If you wanted my opinion, MM is my favorite choice, and Google's service is my second choice.
If you wanted my opinion, MM is my favorite choice, and Google's service is my second choice.
Don't listen to everyone saying there's no alternative, that's just stupid. Gmail works great for syncing up contacts, calendars, and Push email. Dropbox works for file storage.
+1
I used to use Google to sync up contacts and calendar. You do it by using the CalDAV accounts thing in iCal. It all worked over the air so I got OTA updates on my iPod touch without having to plug it into the computer.
It worked, although there were some rough edges. I always had trouble getting contacts to work right sometimes I would go in and find a lot of duplicates or even a few times missing entries. Calendars worked pretty well except for some reason I had trouble with iCal not being able to connect to the google account server from time to time. I had no such troubles with MM when I did the trial.
For bookmarks, I used Fruux (which can also do calendar and contact syncing but it won't do it OTA for a mobile device, only between full OSX computers).
It all worked, and was all free. Perfect? No. As seamless as MM? No. But I wasn't paying anything for it, so I tolerated the minor flaws. The only thing I didn't really get from it was iDisk, which I have determined to be nigh-useless for any kind of real cloud storage anyways. That and OTA bookmark syncing for my iPod touch.
I was finally convinced to get MM because I could get it less than the $100 asking price, and B2MM was something I found myself wanting to use more often. And I had been experiencing pretty constant google iCal syncing problems for about a month prior. I cobbled together a screen sharing solution for my needs, but the B2MM implementation is a lot nicer and if I read it right, just as secure as what I had going (I was doing an SSH tunnel to my computer using a pre-shared key authentication) already. The bonus is that I could turn off the remote login sharing service now and don't get exposed to random hacking attacks like I was before (confirmed by checking secure.log)
So basically I decided to pay some money to get rid of the rough edges in the free solutions I had going. As a bonus I get a me.com email address that has no ads, and I minimize my dissemination of personal information to the googles
.