WSJ: MobileMe Flawed, Ragged

by , 12:30 PM EDT, July 24th, 2008

After a week of intense testing, Walt Mossberg with the Wall Street Journal reported that he cannot recommend MobileMe in its current state. It has too many flaws to keep its promises.

Mr. Mossberg took care to point out that he wasn't referring to the many glitches users experienced at launch, e-mail outages, slow servers, and so on. The WSJ technical editor, usually positive about Apple products, believed that the problems he found are systemic.

After a description of how things are supposed to work, Mr. Mossberg pointed out that: "while changes made on the Web site or the iPhone are instantly pushed to the computers, changes made on computers are only synced every 15 minutes, at best. Apple has admitted that this is a problem, and says it is working on it."

There's more. Mr. Mossberg found the MobileMe Website to be sluggish, and some calendar entries wouldn't load at all. Address book groups on the Mac showed up as separate address books in Outlook. Synced contacts on the iPhone were incomplete. Mr. Mossberg's e-mail rules didn't migrate to the MobileMe e-mail server. Finally, MobileMe mostly failed to sync his bookmarks, but when it succeeded, they were scrambled.

"Apple patiently explained each of my problems, sometimes helping me with workarounds, sometimes claiming they were rare, other times saying that it was working on fixes," Mr. Mossberg concluded. "If Apple does get MobileMe working smoothly, it could be a terrific service. But it's way too ragged now."