All Articles Tagged me.com

Apple’s brand new MobileMe News (formerly MobileMe Updates) is back with their second post this week (and luckily for links, finally sporting unique URLs to boot!). The subject of their latest post? How previous .Mac users can keep using their @mac.com addresses on the iPhone post-MobileMe transition:

If you want to use your mac.com address instead of me.com for the MobileMe address on your iPhone or iPod touch, you can simply remove the me.com account (if you’ve already created one) and then add a new MobileMe account entering username@mac.com for the email address. Any contacts, calendars, and bookmarks you are syncing will re-appear on your phone. It can take several seconds to minutes to update your phone depending on how much data you have and your network connection speed. If possible, it is best to do this when you are on a wi-fi connection for the fastest response.

Easy enough? Well, there is one small little restriction: the above only works if you originally had an @mac.com address prior to July 9, 2008. After the MobileMe transition, no new @mac.com addresses were generated, leaving those new to the… er… new service with @me.com as the only option.

Personally, I’m not sure what to do with my account yet. Me.com seems a little too precious for everyday use, while @mac.com hits too many fanboy cords for comfort. Can we get custom domains for email as well as websites? What’s your preference?

During the 2008 WWDC Keynote today, Apple VP of Marketing, Phil Schiller, confirmed the rumors of a .Mac maga-revamp in the form of MobileMe.

Apple’s answer both to previous critiques of the admittedly out-dated .Mac service, and the expected cloud computing boom (see Android, Google), MobileMe features ActiveSync-like “push” email, calendar, and contacts syncing between your iPhone (or iPod Touch) and your Mac or PC, or via any web browser with some pretty spectacular looking Web 2.0/AJAX style online apps. It also adds photo syncing, clearly targeting consumers.

iDisk (the online storage service) gets a bump to 20GB, and goes fully online as well. Mac user? Still enjoy the Mac sync, iWeb, and Back-to-my-Mac that you know (and I) love.

Launching in July in time for the new iPhone 3G, and priced at the same $99 as .Mac, it still smacks the expensive, but if your don’t have Exchange, and value highly polished syncing and web-based solutions, this might just be the service for you.

Existing .Mac customers will be rolled into MobileMe — see Apple’s migration page for details — with a choice of maintaining their old @mac.com address, or the new @.me equivalent.

For more, go to me.com (which will redirect you to Apple.com/MobileMe), where a handy-dandy MobileMe guided tour awaits!

Yesterday came word that the name Apple might be using to rebrand .Mac was “Mobile Me”, and amid the pitchforks, torches, and angry villagers storming the internet pipes to Cupertino, we figured our readers could easily come up with a better name, and sweetened the pot with $50 worth of gift card incentive to prove it.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber had previously mentioned that iMobile might be an alternative, though his readers felt it could too easily be mistaken for immobile, probably not the poetry Steve Jobs is shooting for.

Now Gruber, and his handy crowd-source at Twitter bring word that just plain old “Me”, surfaced as me.com, could be a candidate as well, and had mysteriously changed ownership just today.

Make of that what you will (and I will continue to make fun, for the same reasons mentioned in the first post). And don’t forget to enter our contest. Pick a better name than “Mobile Me”, and if the blog staff likes your name best, the $50 gift certificate is yours! [We'll compile the guesses from this and from our previous post. The Gift Card is for the Phone different Accessory store. Deadline: 4EST on Monday June 2nd].

[From Dieter: I dislike this whole "me" thing for several reasons. First, it smacks of a 1990's, by-committee branding that sounds hip and clever but is actually staid and out-of-touch. Very Un-Apple. Second: If Apple somehow manages to make this brand hip and the "Me" does make people feel like they have ownership and identity with the brand ("Me.com really is about ME. Gosh, it's like it's my very own internet service,") then they'll be faced with an impossible task: not screwing that up. Think about how unhappy you are with .Mac's reliability and speed. Now imagine if that service weren't called ".Mac" but instead "Me." People will become disenamoured very quickly. Now we can obviously assume that this whole Me.com thing will have better reliability -- but if Apple really is looking for a straight-out, bald-faced "this is Me on the internet" branding, then even the tiniest failure in the system is going to make people super pissed -- it would go from "Aw crap, .Mac sucks again" to "Me.com is down again. Apple broke ME". Not good.

Thirdly: Windows ME. 'nuff said.]