my views on the "freebies" that everyone seems to want...
Here are my views/opinions on the "Freebies" out there that so many believe are such a better option over MobileMe.......WARNING.........LONG RANT & RAVE BELOW:
MobileMe provides:
1. Email: [almost] "first-class" email services; with web, IMAP, POP, & smartphone access.
MobileMe email can be rather slow while deleting and loading but is still an excellent choice for mail. Look at how many times Google's Gmail service goes down now a days, that is certainly not professional looking when trying to communicate with others.
2. Web-storage: web-based disk storage/iDisk; with finder access as well.
iDisk can be frustrating sometimes, based on its slow speeds here and there.
3. Online photo albums: gallery for photos; attractive & visually appealing photo albums that are synced to the mac based iPhoto software. Your gallery visitors can chose to download just individual pics or the entire album via the automatic ".zip file" conversion that will give them a simpler way to get all of your photos without the hassle of downloading them one-by-one. Your gallery can also be viewed many different ways, including as a slideshow. MobileMe gallery can also show video clips, that are grouped separately so that everyone knows that they are clips instead of photo stills.
The gallery can give trouble sometimes too, it can be a little slow and may not load all photos on the first try.
4. Websites: can be hosted via iWeb; which is software based. You design your site with your desired template, graphics and personal touches. Then simply press upload, at that time your changes are added to your site and lets you know when everything is ready for viewing. You can also setup iWeb to use your personal domain, instead of apple's standard link.
iWeb is limited within its functionality sometimes, which can be irritating but overall this is an excellent option if you want attractive hosting but do not want to have a separate web-host.
5. Calendars: the mac-based calendar software will sync your data to all other registered computers and smart-phones, etc. I use this service daily to sync to my 3 office computers and iPhones, very seldom have issues.
6. Contacts: your address book will sync to all registered computers and smart-phones too, keeping you up-to-date and minimize any down-time from missing important address book data.
7. iPhone Tracker: lost your iPhone?, just logon to the MobileMe service and track the location of your phone and hopefully you can recover it quickly, if not, MobileMe also offers the ability to "wipe-out" your private data remotely and reset to factory conditions to prevent any trash from accessing your important info. Because of careless family members, I have had to utilize this function 3 times already.
One big draw back that I can think of for this function is the fact that it cannot be accessed from another iPhone or other smartphone via the me.com site, you must use a desktop browser [from my experiences]. Of the three times that we had to use it, twice I could have used our other iPhone to track it but was forced to return home to use a computer to access me.com instead of by the iphone. Not sure if this will change at some point in the future, hopefully apple will wise up and realize that we need to be able to access the me.com site as well as using their iphone based programs.
8. and more misc functions.
From my point of view: the number of services you would need is at least 7 freebie or other type of service just to come close to what MobileMe gives you. This all comes for about $6.00-$8.00 per month depending on where you buy it from, I have spent anywhere from $99 to as little as $35 bucks. It is up to each consumer to spend a few minutes of their time to shop around and find a bargain, just like any other product that you might be looking to purchase. When you go to the grocery store, you automatically shop for the specials, vs paying full price just for the hell of it. The same goes for buying online, you need to price shop what is the lowest with the most reasonable shipping, and weigh it for yourself as to what is most important.
How much do you [this applies to the majority of people] already spend on coffee, beer, snacks, fast-food or other luxuries each month? For things that you do not really need and could easily go without, if necessary to cover the cost of a "first-class web service like MobileMe". I like most people already know several folks that easily spend $50.00 or more monthly on their coffee binges, just so that they can feel special with their fancy coffee cups from starbucks while surfing the net or gossiping. How about the ones that spend $20-30 every weekend when they go barhopping?, that is a total waste of money from my point of view that could be spent on better and more important things. To me, those things are just not part of my life, therefore I can spend that hard-earned money on more useful items that I like to have such as quality web services, etc. Let the liquor stores and Starbucks get there money from someone else, they won't be getting mine anytime soon, I would rather not waste my money in that way.
This writeup/review is strictly from my personal point-of-view only, you can take from it what you want and the others here. In summary, the MobileMe service as a whole is very good in general. There are always times when things are not perfect, many members had a tough time when Apple was moving from .Mac to the newer MobileMe brand, but they did finally step up and give those affected by the problems an extension on the terms to their individual contracts to the service. This I feel, was a fair solution to everybody complaining about missing messages and downtime that lasted many days [or even weeks for some]. I have been a paid member upon my first Mac [PowerBook 17"] purchase in 2003, and have used their email as my primary since that time with the only exception of trying Gmail for a few days but could not stand the cheap feel of their site, so I stayed with MobileMe. I like so many, have tried these so called "free services", but they are usually too poorly designed and do not convey the same professional look & feel that MM gives their members.
Although, I have been noticing that Apple is slipping ads into the services in different ways. Such as with the iDisk service, when you send someone a link from the web-based portion of the service, the recipient will see a few ads at the bottom of the message. When I am sending a colleague attachments, I do not want to be urging them to use the service [albeit in a subtle way at the bottom of the message] beyond downloading the file that I am trying to send to them.
The way I see it is.......you get what you pay for [or don't pay for], free is not always what it is cracked up to be. Try paying for a good quality service, and it will be much more rewarding than trying to piece together cheap or free ones and make it work, instead you can pay a nominal amount and get an all around much better day-to-day experience.
I have a business associate that insists on having non-business class services instead of going with my suggestions over the years, he just doesn't get it. I suggested to buy an iPhone so that he can access the web, make calls, IM, GPS maps, plus all of the other services that it offers, etc. I also said that using a dedicated web-host like GoDaddy [which does not sound that great but is an awesome host], I have several sites with them and have only experienced about 3 hours of downtime in 7 years.......not bad in my opinion. This is in addition to the other stuff that I have suggested to him, instead, this is what I get to deal with every time I interact with him.
a) every single time when he calls me, the call will dropout at least twice but usually more. I cannot stand it when I am talking with someone, when their phone keeps disconnecting because they go with a cheap provider instead of with one that provides a more quality experience.
b) he does not have a quality connection with web services such as email, IM, faxing, etc. If he went with my suggestion of an iPhone with MobileMe or GoDaddy he would have access to these. I wanted to set him up with the services he needs on a daily basis so that his clients and potential clients would have their time respected by not having to call him back 2, 3 or 4 times because his calls dropout.
If done the right way, he would have: access to faxing thru the GoDaddy web service for $7.00 per month like I do and have not had a problem with it. This way, I can have web based faxing both send & receive all for the price of a latte at starbucks. Using an iPhone would give him all of the mobile options that he needs for his business, and by using a service like this and MobileMe, he could have everything that he needs for very little vs the $10,000 dollars that he spend on phonebook ads that he has been using for 20 years. I insisted for years that he develop a website for his business, he resisted for a long time, finally he agreed but gave me a budget of $300 to do it. I said okay; so I got him a website, email, file storage, photo gallery, blog, and more with website visitor tracking & traffic stats with search engine submission, etc. Unfortunately he decided that he did not want to have all of the "extras" that I worked hard to setup, so he had me take them down and just leave up the main site. When the site was full of the extras, he was averaging several hits per week, from the search engines, and was getting great feedback from a more upscale site, but now after taking most of the stuff down he is just averaging a few sales calls per month instead. But that is still more than what is needed to pay for the service, although the actual income is much lower without the "fluff" as he called it. Visitors like to see photos of what you have done, with a quality site they can see that you will be more likely to give them quality service & products too. Instead, with free [or cheaply made] services the potential customer can get the idea that you do not put as much emphasis on quality but are more interested in being cheap.
I don't mean to beat this to death, I just believe that having good services and products reflect back on your character when communicating with others. Wether you are send business emails, or junk messages to your forum friends, anybody can quickly become an important contact in today's mobile world. Just remember that anyone can become a business contact at some point, you never know who you are talking to or emailing. I was sitting at an MRI/X-ray facility one day [in my paper gown and socks] in the ready to be scanned area in the back, this was basically the hallway next to the rooms. I was there for about 20 minutes, awaiting my MRI prior to surgery the following month. While waiting, there was a lady sitting next to me waiting for her x-ray films to be ready for pickup after her testing. After a few minutes of uncomfortableness due to only wearing a paper gown and socks, but since we were both dealing with the same routine, I soon lost my embarrassment and struck up a conversation about work. She asked how did I hurt my back that I was getting the MRI for, I said that it was DDD which is a degenerative disc condition not from injury or accident. I told her that we have an architectural design business, at which time she said that her boss is a doctor but was renovating houses to flip on the side. Come to find out, they were flipping houses in my old neighborhood of Baltimore, and needed design services. We both had iPhones so we were able to quickly exchange contact information and not have to worry about missing stuff by writing stuff down for her, we were able to just take our phones and beam to one another. Complete with my business website so that her boss could research our previous projects and experience, and I received her info as well. Since I have MobileMe, I was also able to send her a link from my iDisk to download my business newsletter in pdf format, which was complete with our portfolio to view while she waited there for her films. Without the iPhone & iDisk app, I would not have been able to give her this info. Since I was there very early one weekend morning, I did not have my briefcase with me, therefore did not have my business cards either. So the iPhone acts as my business cards many times per week, along with MobileMe and website.
Now that is quick and professional service that could not have been done so seamlessly with those cheap freebie services out there, at least not where it would look as professional as what I was able to send to my new business contact. By the way, we ended up doing two projects for the doctor, one was the residential house renovations and the other for a new doctor's office. Both projects added up to over $23,000 dollars, this was all for being prepared to deal with a situation that I would have never thought was going to happened that day. Considering.......I was only in a paper medical gown and throwaway socks, but still had my locker key on me. When you go into the treatment/testing room they have you hang your locker key up on a hook next to the door so that you are the only one that has access to your stuff. Before going in for my testing, I went back to my assigned locker and took out my iPhone so that we could exchange contact info and then put it back and took my seat waiting for my name to be called. I had a mini-business meeting for 20 minutes prior to my testing and went home, not thinking about it again until we received a call Monday morning to let us know that he wanted us for his first project.
All of this is why I love MobileMe and my other favorite service by GoDaddy, together they are unstoppable.
Matt
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Why do you guys/girls use mobile me? I just don't understand why you would us
e a program that kind of sucks when there are things out there for free that work much better?
So, I don't know if there is something I am missing here?
All input is welcome!
