Is MobileMe worth $99/year?
In case you weren’t following the WWDC news this week, Apple came out with two major products in Monday’s keynote: MobileMe and the iPhone 3G — both of which link together. MobileMe replaces the .Mac service that Apple previously offered, and brings a range of improvements.
First off, you get 20GBs of storage “in the cloud” — this is shared between e-mail, photo galleries and iDisk backup space. The new service gives you an @me.com e-mail address, which is pretty easy to remember — but the chances of you getting your desired username@me.com are slim. MobileMe also syncs everything up between your computer(s) and iPhone; Apple call it “Exchange for the rest of us” because of this.
But is it worth paying $99 a year for this service? You could use Google’s Gmail for push e-mail to your iPhone with their free IMAP service; you could also use Google Calendar for calendars (although syncing to iPhone does not yet exist); you could use Flickr, or Google Picasa Web Gallery; DropBox is a free alternative to the iDisk.
The table below shows MobileMe and all of its main competitors:
It looks like if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, and want to keep it in sync with your e-mail, calendar and contacts — plus benefit from 20GBs of online storage — then MobileMe may be worth the $99 price.
