I purchased a .Mac box set back in mid 2008, a few weeks before the service was announced as having it’s name changed to MobileMe. I managed to get it for a not too bad price (£45 instead of the usual £59), and it worked very well with my iPhone and Mac. Initially, MobileMe was quite unstable, going up and down quite a bit after it’s launch, but after a month or so it became stable, and Apple gave a free extension to all accounts (hence why my one year account has lasted a few months more).
I’m not posting this because I want to complain, I’m posting this because I want to express my love, yet at the same time, shall we say, dislike, of MobileMe. At £59 per year, it’s not cheap. Yes, technically, it’s less then £5 a month, but the only thing I managed to ever use it for was syncing and Find My iPhone, and that’s more then I feel is necessary for that, especially when you can get it for free or cheap elsewhere (eg, Google Sync is free, albeit with no Find My iPhone feature).
As the full package, if you make use of the full suite of features – sync, email, gallery, iDisk, Find My iPhone, Remote Wipe, Back to my Mac, etc, it is, in some ways, worth the money. However, for just sync, it is not. And here’s where my idea comes in. I think that Apple should offer two versions of MobileMe. First off, the full package, with everything, at £59 per year. Secondly, a smaller and cheaper package, called MobileMe Sync. Advertise it as “the basics” for the iPhone, or something like that, and price it low – £15-20 per year is ideal. MobileMe Sync would offer calendar, contacts, and bookmark syncing, along with Find My iPhone, and Remote Wipe, all for a low fee, with, say, 20-50MB of storage for calendars, contacts, and bookmarks. I think that this would appeal to a fair few people, myself included, as it offers just the commonly used basic options, as well as Find My iPhone, which is quite useful if you do happen to lose your phone. This would offer an incentive for Exchange users too – Exchange does allow remote wiping of mobile devices, but it can’t find them.
In addition to that, the current MobileMe service has a “family pack”, whereby you can add additional users onto your MobileMe subscription, and with MobileMe sync, you could do much the same – but for less. Maybe £5 per extra user?
I hope Apple do consider this in future, as I’m sure it would allow them to earn even more money ( 
) – they already have the server infrastructure in place, and of course it would need a few tweaks to both OS X and the iPhone OS to work, but in the end I think it would be worth it.
So, that’s why I’ve not renewed my MobileMe subscription this year. I simply don’t need to spend £59 on something that I use a very small part of. In the meantime, I’ve switched to using a friend’s Exchange server, which does the same job (albeit without being able to locate my phone if I lose it), but for free. 
), and after about 20 minutes, you’re into the treetops.
) and it was pretty sweet. The course isn’t amazingly long, but it keeps you busy and does take a couple of hours to get through. I would highly recommend it if you have one nearby. 
), and they have quite a few locations around the UK, so it’s not too far to drive most of the time.
In The Castle by Wolfmother
