How to get Apple MobileMe for free

Davey Winder
Tuesday, 22 July 2008 17:34

Your IT - Mobility

The simple truth is that we cannot say that you will be able to get MobileMe for free, forever. But, and in this case it is a but the size of an opera singers arse, as MobileMe continues to struggle with providing any semblance of a fully operational service the chances are high that there will be more apologies and more free extensions coming your way. Hell, just look at the problems Apple has had in delivering a simple software upgrade service and you can imagine the problems it will have with a complex cloud computing system.

The web services are still flakey to say the least, just pop over to the MobileMe support page and you will see a status message which says that "1% of MobileMe members cannot access MobileMe Mail." Really? Just a single solitary one percent? Reading the support forums themselves and searching around the web, it would appear that Apple has lost the plot when it comes to basic maths.

Apple has also lost the plot when it comes right back to that Exchange for the rest of us promise it would seem. After all, think of Exchange and you think of Outlook. And Outlook users appear less than happy with MobileMe right now as well. If they create appointments on the iPhone then they do not seem to arrive in Outlook on the desktop when synchronised, or rather not as the case appears to be, via MobileMe. You can see the appointment in your Today view, but not in your calendar.

If you are suffering from the same problem you might want to ask Apple for some more free time, I have a sneaking suspicion they will be only too glad to accommodate you based on the events of the last week or so.

So there you have it, MobileMe for free. Kind of. The clever money, however, is on people saying enough is enough and looking for alternative in the cloud social synchronisation of the sort provided by Google or even, dare I say it, BlackBerry...