I’ve been checking into mobile me in the past few days and find some features missing or partly functional.  Homepage has not been available for me, some important links to help and faqs won’t load, and numerous other glitches.

I am wondering if it would have been better to gradually introduce mobile me or put it forward as a beta like Google does to acknowledge that there would be a development in the service.

It is surely a complex and daunting task to put up such a service that so many people use and make it work well but I think Apple overestimated their ability to roll it out full scale without problems.  That said I think that some of the features, especially the new gallery page, are very nice.

Re: Me.com should have been beta?

[quote author=“Bryanyc”]I’ve been checking into mobile me in the past few days and find some features missing or partly functional.  Homepage has not been available for me, some important links to help and faqs won’t load, and numerous other glitches.

I am wondering if it would have been better to gradually introduce mobile me or put it forward as a beta like Google does to acknowledge that there would be a development in the service.

It is surely a complex and daunting task to put up such a service that so many people use and make it work well but I think Apple overestimated their ability to roll it out full scale without problems.  That said I think that some of the features, especially the new gallery page, are very nice.

I think Apple was in a tough position in that it couldn’t offer MobileMe as a free beta while still charging for .Mac.  Admitting the problems and giving everybody a free month is probably the best they could do today. (Basically a free -beta for a one month, if you pay for 12 mos.  )

Unfortunately 1 month’s free subscription is not enough for me. I am furious at the cock-ups. I sync between three Macs and my iPhone, and access the webapps at mobileme from other PCs too and can state categorically that IT DOES NOT WORK.

I need to keep re-syncing the Macs on occasion, and many times the mobileme apps do not work properly - particularly the address book which inexplicably fails to show all your contact sometimes, and at others does so, and the calendar app which even when I’ve added items from my iPhone, does not update. If I add an iCal event on my Mac sometimes it appears on mobileme, sometimes it doesn’t - ever - even if I force a manual sync. Sometimes it will appear on my iPhone’s iCal but not on the mobileme web app iCal.

Sometimes if I enter an event on my iPhone it won’t appear on the mobileme webapp but WILL appear on my desktop Mac!

And the Contacts webapp? With some of my contacts, it simply refuses to display the phone number associated with the contact, even though it appears in my iPhone’s sync’d contacts, and on my Macs’ Addressbook apps.

It a total disaster basically. It works sometimes - but when you need access to your data, and you need that access to be reliable, it sucks. Apple have really dropped the ball on this on an unprecedented scale.

This is THE WORST roll out of ANY Apple product I can ever recall.

I am amazed they haven’t been totally taken to task for this in a more aggressive manner. On the surface, it seems to work just fine, which is why the reviews are on the whole fairly positive -some even glowing, but when you actually really try to use it, and start checking the me.com site, comparing it against the email, calendars, and contacts on your iPhone and your Macs you see discrepancies galore!

And then there’s the “preferences” in mobileme iCal - the one that offers to “hide” To-Do items after a set number of days. Well guess what - even ToDos I have ticked as “completed” show up anyway! And nested subfolders in mail -there’s an option to turn off the automatic display of nested subfolders. You check it, and when you go into the mobileme mail app, all the sub-folders are open!

This is a totally flakey, incompetent, pathetic, and disastrous launch for mobileme and whilst I might be one of the bigest Apple fanboys on the planet, it is for that reason that I think whoever is responsible for mobileme at Apple should be sacked, hung, drawn, and quartered. As the very foundation for the future of Apple’s online services - and therefore the company itself - this roll out is a disgrace, dangerous, and calls into question everything we take for granted about Apple’s commitment to excellence.

I am totally disgusted with mobileme. Its a disgrace, and I am sick of having to constantly try to get all my devices in sync with one another, and having events/contacts/numbers go missing. This is meant to make my life easier, not harder - where did they get the development manager for MobileMe from - Microsoft?

If I was a RIMM employee, I would be laughing my fscking ass off at this.. Apple will obviously get this right eventually, and then it will really rock because the potential and usefulness of a fully-functional mobileme system is obvious, but as it was launched, and as it still stands, the system is totally unreliable and a huge danger to anyone who values the integrity of their data.

I am furious at this cock-up. Apple, you suck. There. I said it.

It’s not just all that, it’s the front end UI.  Very un-Mac like IMHO.  I am using it on 3 Macs and an iPhone. Sure everything is now synced, but not without a lot of hassle.  I would have expected a front end something like this

Hello, we see you have 3 Macs and an iphone - what would you like to do?

Then a list of numerous options, not “merge all - and trust to luck”.

Apple, you suck. There. I said it.

My new sig .....  Just kidding

Nice rant and all completely understandable given the emphasis Apple is putting on MobilMe and the importance of data integrity.

If this is a poll question I vote it sucks. What were they thinking. Kinda makes you rethink that whole enterprise ready theory.

[quote author=“danthemason”]If this is a poll question I vote it sucks. What were they thinking. Kinda makes you rethink that whole enterprise ready theory.

Enterprise is fine - by all accounts, the Microsoft Exchange syncing works absolutely flawlessly.

Its us consumers relying on Apple’s own syncing product - MobileMe - that sucks. The Microsoft-provided enterprise solution works perfectly.

The irony. Oh, the irony. Oh the shame the shame!

/gnashes teeth, pulls hair out, rolls eyes to back of head whilst wailing

From Appleinsider :

Apple apologizes to MobileMe subscribers with free 30-day extension

By Sam Oliver
Published: 11:00 AM EST
. Apple on Wednesday admitted to botching the launch of its new MobileMe Internet service and said all current customers will be awarded with a free 30-day extension to their subscription as a result.

“The transition from .Mac to MobileMe was a lot rockier than we had hoped,” the company said on its website. “We will be extending subscriptions by 30 days to customers free of charge to express our appreciation for their patience during the transition period.”

In an email to subscribers, Apple noted that although the launch of core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications “had lots of problems.”

“Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running,” the company said.

In the same email, the iPhone maker also acknowledge that its use of the word “push” in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella proved to be misleading.

“While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe ‘cloud,’ changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices,” the company said. “So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word ‘push’ until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.”

MobileMe subscribers should look for their automatic 30-day extension to be reflected in their account settings within the next few weeks.

It was worse than beta, but I’ve been messing about with everything in my own world trying to map a domain name completely to MobileMe (web & mail), so not looking to check sensible behaviour from MobileMe.

What I am expecting to have to do in a week or so is do a special sync from my main Mac which will replace all the data at MobileMe. (System prefs>mobileme>sync>advanced>reset sync data). I’m willing to give Apple back the 30 days to sort it out, but after that . . . .

“Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running,” the company said.

BS… BShit…..BULL$HIT!

They are NOT working properly at all. This is really annoying me… Apple is blatantly lying through its teeth here and its OUR data that’s being put at risk. This is at best incompetence at worst almost criminally negligent. Apple should have instead advised users to turn OFF mobileme syncing and taken down mobileme altogether until it was working properly.

The web apps might be up and running, but so is a V12 Ferrari with a blown head gasket and busted wheel bearings - it might look pretty, but its not going to get you anywhere except into a nasty accident :x

[quote author=“sleepygeek”]What I am expecting to have to do in a week or so is do a special sync from my main Mac which will replace all the data at MobileMe. (System prefs>mobileme>sync>advanced>reset sync data). I’m willing to give Apple back the 30 days to sort it out, but after that . . . .

Between my 3 Macs I’ve had to do that, and the reverse, several times each day to try and get them all “lined up” in sync.

And still it won’t work. And all the aforementioned problems in my earlier rant regarding the web apps and their erroneous adherence (or lack of) to preferences, and their nonchalant attitude to actually deciding whether to show you all your data or not, or update, still exist.

Great Depression? My great depression isn’t about the economy - its Apple’s singular inability to every truly get syncing working.

For me, the most infuriating aspect of MobileMe is not the beta quality of its semi-functioning web apps.  While events may take hours to show up in calendar, and my mail programs never seem to really be synced, i can live with that - for the next couple weeks, at least.

No, what particularly infuriates me is the fact that large aspects of the web apps flat out do not work.  For starters, when composing an email, I am supposed to be able to simply start typing a name, and mail is supposed to fill in the rest for me.  This doesn’t even semi-function.  Nothing happens at all.

To get around this, I click on the little address book button on the compose page to see my contacts.  Here, Apple has done me the courtesy of displaying this message for the last week: “Contacts is temporarily unavailable. We’re working hard to restore normal service. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

I tell you - it takes cojones to call a feature a “normal service” if it has, at no point in time, ever worked.

As for other things that particularly enrage me, how about the fact that MobileMe mail counts every message in your inbox when displaying how many messages you have - even if you’ve already read them???? At what point did Apple programmers decide that the Apple Mail program was incorrect in its decision to only count unread messages?

And, finally, the biggest non-feature that simply kills me is the inability to change the address with which emails are sent from MobileMe.  Why would I want to send professional emails from an @me.com address?  Why can’t I simply use the MobileMe web app, but disguise the email under my professional name?  And, no, I don’t want to use the account settings to enter a new domain.  I want to be able to, at a MINIMUM, change the reply-to field.  I may be absolutely idiotic, but I have yet to find this field on MobileMe.

EDIT:  Why in the world can’t I view my emails by thread on MobileMe?  Is that really such a difficult technology?

Gillon, I’ve encountered all the problems you’ve mentioned too, and they are indeed infuriating. The system should just be taken down for a week or two, until its ready.

This is Apple’s biggest cock-up in years. Fortunately its the least visible, in many senses, of its product line-up because it isn’t seen as a (big) contributor to the bottom line, but MobileMe is in many ways part of the iPhone experience and Apple have a very limited window of opportunity to correct this fiasco - and there is no other word for it - before quickly developing a reputation for having unreliable sync services that will take a lot of time and effort to overcome. Good reputations take years to build, and can vanish in an instant. In a field it is a newcomer to, but acting like the heavyweight in the room thanks to such high unit sales, Apple is endangering its reputation for producing products and services which just seamlessly integrate and “just work.”

MobileMe had better be the first and last time they screw up. And someone DEFINITELY needs to be fired. Hey, how about a version of The Apprentice featuring Steve Jobs as the boss? Oh boy, now wouldn’t that be compelling viewing

More mobile me woes: if you transfer your “On My Mac” mail (ie. the mail you have stored locally) to MobileMe, so in effect all your emails are stored in the cloud (although your Mac caches local copies too), there is NO WAY of sorting by date on the iPhone - which means that the OLDEST messages in the folders you’ve transferred appeared first.

if you have hundreds or thousands of emails in a folder, you can’t get to the latest one you’ve stored unless you go through the entire folder! The oddest thing is that as you add new messages from your INBOX to those MobileMe folders, they DO appear at the top of the list.

Using the MobileMe Mail Web App you can sort by date, so this problem is not an issue if you’re accessing MM via the Web (though your set-up is never stored from sessions to session so you always have to re-order your sorting priorities every time you use it) but the weird way the iPhone handles MobileMe-stored emails is infuriating.

Its so confusing.

And of course there’s no search facility on the iPhone, so you can’t search for a particular email if you want to and its buried way deep down in a folder that hasn’t yet been loaded and cached locally on the iPhone. Why can’t you do a search, and have the iPhone send the search query to MobileMe and come back with a list of matching emails, just like the search window in the desktop Mail App?

I could go on and on. All in all though, MobileMe is a disaster story in my books and I’m thoroughly disgusted with it. Its not worthy of having a Microsoft label on it, let alone an Apple product.

At least Microsoft Exchange, gmail, and Blackberry BES services actually work.

Apple is sending the following email to MobileMe subscribers. I received it just a moment ago.

Important points…
- They are not going to use the “push” term until it’s true of desktop computers as well.
- Members are getting an extra 30 days free for their trouble.

We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.

Although core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications had lots of problems initially. Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running.

Another snag we have run into is our use of the word “push” in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella. While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe “cloud,” changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices. So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word “push” until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.

We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. Your extension will be reflected in your account settings within the next few weeks.

We hope you enjoy your new suite of web applications at me.com, in addition to keeping your iPhone and iPod touch wirelessly in sync with these new web applications and your Mac or PC.

Thank you,
The MobileMe Team

David, as pointed out above, this email is a complete lie and totally misleading. Apple are lying through their teeth about the true state of affairs WRT MobileMe as far as I’m concerned.