les james

design & stuff

The MobileMe Transition

A month or two ago I decided that I was through paying $99 a year for MobileMe. I have been using the service for a couple years now. There are some great things about the service, especially for a guy like me who is a total Apple fan boy. But the cost is just too much and there are plenty of other options out there. The services that I used the most are:

Email is the real biggie here but also the easiest to transition off of. Actually it’s going to be really nice to get a fresh email account. I finally took les at lesjames dot com and ported it over to Google Apps (Gmail). Mac Mail and my iPhone both sync nicely with Gmail. I still have push and great web access. The nice thing about all this is that I still have a couple months left of MobileMe so I can slowly ween myself off of it.

Photos and iDisk were never great with MobileMe so I have no problems here. I’m going to use Flickr as my photo repository and Dropbox is just about the coolest thing since Nintendo (I’m going to start using Nintendo instead of sliced bread as my default measuring stick of coolest since). BTW if anyone wants to give Dropbox a whirl use that link because we will both get extra space.

Sync is going to be the biggest loss here. I love how MobileMe keeps my laptop, cloud and iPhone all in perfect sync. It’s the tight integration you would expect from Apple having control over both the hardware and software. I’m pretty sure I can get contacts to sync up but I’m scared of calendars. The other nice thing about MobileMe was it synced my computer preferences too. When my laptop went down for a week between MobileMe sync and Time Machine I didn’t miss a step on my loaner Mac. I’ve also never had to use MobileMe to find my lost iPhone (knocking on wood now), but when I turn the service off I just know that is when Find My iPhone is going to come in handy.

I’m going to start transitioning my contacts to Google so hopefully it goes smoothly. I’ll give it a couple weeks and then report back. I’m saving calendars for last because I just know that will end up being a pain. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

[Update]
So I have switched off MobileMe contact syncing for my iPhone and laptop. Fortunatly Mac Address book has an option for syncing with Google Contacts. When I set up my gmail account on the iPhone it magically started syncing my contacts too. The process wasn’t entirely painless because I had a tough time with duplicate and sometimes triplicate contact entries showing up, but I think everything is in sync now. As a side note, my contacts in Google Apps and my Google Account are completely different lists and I can’t get the two to sync. So I wiped out my contacts from my account (not gmail in apps). The whole thing was quite confusing there for a little while. Google should do a better job of meshing my account with Apps.

I’m going to let the dust settle with contacts before I try and tackle calendars. I’ll update when I give it a go.

[Update]
When I switch off MobileMe I will lose the Find My iPhone feature which thankfully I have never needed. This app could be a nice alternative: Undercover

[Update]
Thanks to this great article on iPhone.AppStorm I have now transitioned off of MobileMe calendars and switched to Google. This was the last piece of the puzzle. Yay!

[Update]
I have turned off MobileMe on my computer. All mail, contacts and calendars are being handled by Google now. I feel like I’m a step closer to digital harmony.