Apple have spent the last couple of weeks trying to turn themselves into Microsoft, rolling out their new MobileMe service … in theory, it’s a great idea, providing a way to automatically and instantly synchronize your iPhone to your home computer. In practice, it’s not so great – not only do many of it’s features not yet work as originally advertised, some users messages are lost, but even without the hiccups it will only work if you “jump in the deep end” with them, changing your email address and everything to fit their scheme.
My friend Robert has been cursing them regularly – and publicly now over at TwistyBitz:
Personally, I don’t want to pay $99/year to have yet another email address; I’m perfectly happy with Gmail and all the other free features they offer – I already have my Gmail sync’ed with my iPhone (OK, not in real time, but close). And now – thanks for the heads up, Josh – I’m able to have my Google Calendar sync’ed in real time with my iPhone!
If you have not heard of this yet, head over to NuevaSync and check out their service … like MobileMe it’s suffering a little from the sudden increase in demand from iPhone users, but unlike Apple it won’t break anything if it doesn’t work, and anyway tonight it’s working well 🙂
Basically, if you have a Google Calendar, you set up an account on NuevaSync, link it to the Google Calendar, then set up your iPhone to access NuevaSync as an Exchange service. After that you enable Calendar sync’ing, and your Google Calendar magically appears on your iPhone (and any changes you make to it, get sync’ed back the other way!)
One warning … Apple will wipe any calendar data in your iPhone when you start this process, so make sure your Google Calendar is up to date before you begin.
M&I / GBMINI 
I bit on the $30 discount for mobileme when buying my 3G, but so far it is 100% useless. People are more reluctant to change their email address than their phone numbers these days, yet apple expects you to change yours if you want to use push. I would consider “returning” it but I’m waiting to see if mobileme is needed when 3rd party push notifications come in september.
Huh, noticed I couldn’t comment on his blog the other day but figured he was just editing some files at the time. Too bad that it is an Apple problem. Seems like the iPhone 3G + MobileMe experiences have tarnished the ‘it just works’ mantra. I’m still getting the iPhone when the queues die down (and the cases aren’t cracking!).
On a separate note – am I the only one who doesn’t get updates in his RSS feed for RB’s blog? I use GoogleReader but can’t remember ever seeing a new posting there, I always have to go and check manually.
Sorry Ian for the thread hijack.
I don’t understand the statement that you “have” to change your email address to use MobileMe. That is absolutely not the case. I continue to use FastMail.fm as my mail provider with my iPhone (v2.0 OS), along with MobileMe for contacts and calendar syncing. I’ll never use my MobileMe email account, so I’ve disabled it on my iPhone, leaving contacts, calendars, and bookmarks syncing enabled. In the iPhone’s Mail application, you’d never know I have a MobileMe account. FastMail supports IMAP (as does every other mail provider living in the 21st century [I’m looking at you, Yahoo]) and checking for new mail every 5 minutes is really quite good enough for me…
But don’t you think, Brian, that $99/year is a bit pricey just so you can forward contacts & calendars to your iPhone?
Paul,
I always still use GoMotoring, and that does show TwistyBitz updates correctly … maybe the iWeb format isn’t correctly handled by Google Reader?
Well I don’t know how Ian posted a comment at my blog but he did??? I have tried 3 different browsers, Netscape, FireFox and Safari and it won’t allow me to post a commnet.
Paul, I have others that seem to be getting my RSS?
AppleSoft… “It Just Sorta Works!” I love my Apple stuff but this is getting near the bursting point for me!
If it works like it should (ie. as they originally advertised it), then perhaps not. I have two Macs and an iPhone. I like having access to my most important information simultaneously on all three, and I think that is worth $8.25/month *if it works*. Not being able to see the calendars that I’ve subscribed to in iCal on my iPhone is a fairly serious bug, which I hope will be rectified before I buy the service. I also want live two-way sync with Google Calendar. I’m not willing to give up the power and flexibility of my desktop apps (Mail.app, iCal, Address Book) just to have syncing via “the cloud” on my iPhone, however, which is why I don’t think NuevaSync is a viable solution for me.
The cost of, what was mac.com, me.com is nothing. Once AppleSoft becomes Apple again all will be fine, I hope.
I may just take my store and put it on BlueHost.com and leave the blog on me.com so I can keep the kool stuff me offers… or should I say will offer once it’s working.