Geekygrad’s Blog

MobileMe, Apple’s cloud computing service was supposed to be like ‘Exchange for the rest of us’. It wasn’t. The real reason I liked it was the promise of push email and over-the-air update of bookmark, contact and calendar information. I own my own domain name and had toyed with the free edition of Google Apps, but I decided to go with MobileMe for the integration it claimed to offer with other Apple products. Here’s what I found:

• The IMAP server is slow, as is the webmail interface.
• The system does not integrate well with personal domain names. You can redirect a domain name to your web space on it, but there’s no facility for e-mail handling. It’s basically not designed for that kind of usage.
• The web interface will not function on IE6. I’m no lover of that browser, but it is often the only one installed on public computers. When I was in a hotel New York a while back, I had no access to my e-mail because MobileMe wouldn’t let me use IE6. There should at least be a graceful downgrade to non-javascript HTML.
• Whilst I was in an airport, MobileMe decided to delete all my contacts off my iPhone. That’s just not on in a paid-for product.
• MobileMe on Windows was a disaster – I ended up with duplicated contacts and some calendar items didn’t sync at all. (I will admit my Workstation uses XP x64 which isn’t well supported by iTunes, I just wanted Windows so I could also sync to our Sun ONE calendar in college).

By contrast

• Google Apps is free – other than buying your domain in the first place. For zero cost you get hosted GMail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites.
• The web interface is tried and tested, it works on pretty much any browser you throw at it. The calendar interface in particular is just fantastic. It’s insanely fast and downgrades well on older browsers.
• GMail’s integration with Apple Mail can be a bit quirky, but once you set up the folders correctly it works very well.
• Google Apps can share calendars and documents with people on GMail.
• The Google Sites tool is just awesome.
• You can make up unlimited aliases, like on GMail. So if an e-mail address does get spammed, it’s easy to find the culprit.

The only downside to the move is that syncing needs to be manually set up, and I can’t sync to my iPhone over-the-air. I tend to plug it in each evening, however so it’s not exactly a problem. (Another day’s discussion is why Apple won’t implement WiFi-sync – that would solve this problem too!)

On the sync front I had tried Spanning Sync to put my calendar on Google’s normal calendar service, and happily that’ll work with Google Apps calendars too! It’ll also sync your contacts as well and seems to do it reliably. It’s well worth the $65 in my opinion and it’s got an active development team behind it. (Google also have a new sync tool themselves which may be worth checking out.)

The whole setup seems to be working very well after a couple of days – I’ve already got most of my personal e-mail moved over and my calendars are live too. Only thing left to do now is cancel that MobileMe subscription.