When Apple unveiled, MobileMe at WWDC ‘08 many people were excited about the service. Apple was bringing enterprise to the home user. Many of the features that we grow to depend on in the corporate setting, like synchronization between a variety of devices, was finally making its way into an Apple product.

MobileMe launched along with the iPhone 3G, and the App store it had a lot of problems. Some of the features that were revealed at the WWDC ‘08 convention simply weren’t working as advertised. For example, MobileMe is supposed to push new email, contacts, and calendar events to your Mac, PC, iPhone, and iPod touch. MobileMe accomplishes this by using a secure online server or “cloud”. However, it wasn’t working that way. I’m a MobileMe subscriber at times it would take several minutes for my information to be updated to my iPod or other Mac computers at times it simply would not update. Some subscribers also experienced deleted emails causing Apple to send another email regarding this issue. According to Apple’s email 10% of the emails lost weren’t able to be recovered. Plagued with the issues facing the MobileMe service left Apple scrambling the mop up the blunders that have plagued MobileMe.

Apple has responded MobileMe subscribers quickly. After the problems were apparent Apple quickly extended MobileMe subscribers service by thirty additional days. Included in were some trial users who had their subscription extended due to billing issues.

MobileMe subscribers received a surprise when they opened up their email. Apple is offering an additional 60 day extension to MobileMe subscribers. The email states, “We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users’ patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension.” You can read additional details about the MobileMe 60 day extension by logging onto the Apple website.

It’s obvious that MobileMe should not have been released when it was. It wasn’t ready. In fact Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, acknowledged this in an internal email admitting to the blunders with MobileMe service. In the email Jobs stated that MobileMe should not have been launched at along with the iPhone 3G and the App store.

MobileMe service has made improvements since the initial launch but Apple still needs to make additional improvements to this service. Apple is aware of this and has created the MobileMe status blog. Which gives users a way to stay abreast on the updates.
I’m a MobileMe subscriber and have it set up in my RSS feed.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 7:40 pm under Announcements, Apple.  Print This Post

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