Review: Apple Mobile Me synchronisation software

Mobile Me started life as .Mac (pronounced ‘dot-Mac’) ­ an online email and storage service for Mac users.

It also offered synchronisation features that made it possible to keep multiple Macs up to date with all your latest emails, contacts and calendar info.

However, Mobile Me extends and updates that service so it now works with PCs, along with mobile devices such as the iPhone.

When you sign up for Mobile Me you get a new me.com email address, an iDisk that provides 20GB of online storage and a simple 'web gallery' tool that allows you to quickly create web pages containing an online photo-gallery.

None of these features is worth paying a subscription of £59 per year, as companies such as Google, Yahoo and many others already provide similar services for free. However, the core of Mobile Me is the push system that allows it to synchronise information across multiple computers and devices.

Apple refers to Mobile Me as ‘Exchange for the rest of us’ ­ referring to the Microsoft Exchange server software that many large businesses use to manage their email and communications systems. It stores information such as your emails, contacts and calendars on an online server that Apple calls ‘the cloud’. Any new emails, contacts or calendar events that you receive or create are automatically picked up by the cloud and transmitted to any device logged in to your Mobile Me account. This ensures all your devices are automatically updated with the same information.

The sync service does work well, and it’s nice to just pick up your laptop knowing it will automatically sync with your main desktop computer and keep emails and contacts up to date. However, the documentation ­ a ramshackle collection of FAQs on the www.me.com website ­ is an unhelpful mess. It also leans towards Mac users who use their Mobile Me address as their primary email address. We struggled for some time to get the synchronisation features working with our office email address on our desktop and notebook PCs.

One solution is to use the suite of web apps that is also provided on the www.me.com website. Apple has created fully-featured email, contacts and calendar programs that work within your browser. This means you can keep up to date with your emails and other information by using any computer with an internet connection ­ handy if you’re away from home without your laptop. However, that annoying Mac bias strikes again, as Apple warns that Internet Explorer may not work properly with these web apps and recommends using either Firefox or its own Safari browser.

That Mac bias means Mobile Me works best with Macs and the standard mail, contacts and calendar programs that Apple includes on all Mac models. Mobile Me does work with PCs, but coaxing it into life seems more of a struggle. And, of course, if Mobile Me is ‘Exchange for the rest of us’ then business users that already use Exchange won’t need it at all. Ultimately, we can’t recommend Mobile Me to PC users unless they have lots of computers, iPhones and iPods that would benefit from its synchronisation capabilities (again, the Mac bias means Mobile Me works with the iPhone but not with rival types of smartphone).

However, it’s worth considering if you only use Macs, or if you’re one of the increasing number of people who have a PC at work and a Mac at home. There’s also a two-month free trial available, so you can try it out and see if it suits your needs before buying a full annual subscription.