WSJ: MobileMe Flawed, Ragged

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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 wasnit 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."

Thereis more. Mr. Mossberg found the MobileMe Website to be sluggish, and some calendar entries wouldnit 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. Mossbergis e-mail rules didnit 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 itis way too ragged now."

John Martellaro

John Martellaro

John Martellaro was born at an early age and began writing about computers soon after that. He is a former U.S. Air Force officer and has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple. At Apple he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager, a Federal Account Executive and a High Performance Computing manager. His interests include skiing, chess, science fiction and astronomy. You can follow John on Twitter at twitter.com/jmartellaro.

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