elfineer | blog

The service me.com is a newer version of .Mac – it offers e-mail account with nice address @me.com, calendar, contact list, online storage (iDisk) and web photo gallery.

Me.com is not free, it costs $100 a year (or €80) and you get 20GB (with 200GB monthly transfer). You can also buy additional 20GB for $49 or „Family Pack“ (5 accounts for $150).

You can try it for free for 60 days, but you have to enter your credit card number before this free trial – if you do not like it, you cancel the subscription and Apple will not charge you.

Synchronization

All your data are synchronized by iTunes in Windows – when you install iTunes, the new item in your Control Panel appears – MobileMe Preferences. You enter your account info (username and password) here, what you want to synchronize (calendar, contacts…) and it is ready.

It would be better, if iTunes asked you, if you wanted to use MobileMe or iPod and not to have still running ipodservice.exe.

E-mail

When you have full account (not free trial), you can use 5 aliases, for example for filtering incoming e-mails (personal/work…). E-mails can be downloaded by IMAP/SMTP. Me.com can automaticly check your other e-mails (POP) or forward all your e-mails to other address. I did not find advanced filtering rules like in Gmail.

Calendar and Contacts

Contact book works as you expect, so does calendar. It seems little like more simple version of Google Calendar.

iDisk

You can upload files to iDisk and also make them public. I did not find any utility for connect iDisk as a new disk drive to Windows, only upload from browser.

Photo gallery

The photos can be uploaded by e-mail (like in Flickr) – you get the e-mail address and all pictures send there will appear in your album – good for mobile phones with e-mail client (especially iPhone :)) – it can also be used with MMS to e-mail (Multimedia Messaging Service).

Summary

The whole Me.com service is well-designed and easy-to-use (like all Apple products). But I think, $100/€80 is too much for it. It does not give you more features or comfort than Google services. You can use Google Calendar, Gmail and Picasa for free and synchronize calendar with Outlook using this utility. But anyway, synchronization with iPhone is a great advantage of me.com.

IMHO I would preffer some free service for e-mail (like Gmail) because if you pay for e-mail and want to leave it, you cannot. This is why I do not use e-mail account from ISP.

So I think that me.com is not good for Windows-only users. Synchronization with Outlook is only bonus for Apple users – Apple describes typical usage as Mac at home, iPhone and PC at work.

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