How to get Apple MobileMe for free

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 22 July 2008 17:34

Your IT - Mobility

MobileMe was meant to be "Exchange for the rest of us" according to Steve Jobs, providing a USD $99 per year one-stop-lifestyle-shop bringing sychronised contacts, calendaring and email onto your Mac, PC and iPhone. Pretty much everything that could go wrong, has gone wrong. Bad for Apple, great for the end user who wants to get MobileMe for free...

It was only last month that Steve Jobs announced at the 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference that MobileMe would be Exchange for the rest of us. Clearly wanting to jump aboard the same 'your life in the cloud' bandwagon, jealously watching BlackBerry and its army of CrackBerry addicts, Apple thought that it was on to a sure fire winner.

It might have been, had it worked. It might still be, if Apple can get it working. However, goodwill is not an easy thing to come by, and even Apple fanboys are starting to cut up rough about their treatment at the hands of the MobileMe machine. You only have to browse the Apple MobileMe Support Forums for evidence of the growing unrest.

Everything started pear shaped immediately upon launch, with eager early adopters complaining that either they could not login to the service or they could not sync with their new iPhone when they had. Emails mysteriously vanished into the ether never to be seen again, the great 'push' which promised instant BlackBerry-alike synchronisation turned out to be more of a slow 'pull' with reports of 15 minute delays when syncing computers with the cloud.

Apple responded to the online storm of protests by sending out an email to MobileMe users last week apologising for the launch hiccups and pretty much admitting that perhaps it was a little over enthusiastic in its use of 'push' to describe the service.

"While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe cloud" Apple said "changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices."

Read on to discover how to get MobileMe for free...

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