• Email
• Contacts
• Calendar
• Sync
• iDisk
• Photos

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.

I thought to myself several times how awesome Pandora is. A commercial free radio station built just for me delivered right to my living room stereo. Pandora is the epitome of what the internet should be, all about me. Exactly what I want, when I want it and how I want it with no strings attached.

This is why I laughed so hard when I downloaded the XM Radio app. I already subscribe to XM through the unit in my car. I think I pay around $12 a month. That price is going up however because the music industry wants more royalties so it will probably be around $15 a month. Trust me when I say I’m real close to dropping the service because of this. So when I fired up the iPhone app for the first time and I got stopped because my subscription isn’t good enough. I need to pay an additional $3 a month for online access. I laughed my ass off and then got really pissed off. Three more bucks a month for a service I already pay for, just a different delivery method? They have lost their minds! Pandora is ten times better then XM and it’s totally free.

I guess some people just don’t get it and are destined to fail. Which brings me to the newspaper industry. (LOL, nice transition eh?) What if papers adopted the Pandora philosophy of what, how and when I want it with no strings attached? Let’s tackle the money issue first. I don’t mind banner ads as long as they don’t expand, speak or move around. Just stay in the sidebar like a good ad should and I’m cool with that. There should also only be one to two ads max. Newspaper websites look like a flea market right now. It’s disgusting! I say clear it all out and charge a premium for that single sidebar placement. A single quality ad that is targeted for me might actually get me to click on it. What a concept, advertising that works!

How about the actual content? The very best part of Pandora is that I can define my radio station. I give a thumbs up to a song and it plays more like it while a thumbs down will avoid similar songs. It is constantly learning what I want. Could papers do this? Could they create content that the user actually wants and then constantly refine it until the user essentially has their own custom newspaper? How great would that be! Have a thumbs up and down on every story so that I can tell the paper, feed me more stories like this and less stories like that. Don’t take those results and apply them to everyone, just to me. Everyone would get exactly what they want and how great is that! The technology to do it is there but the mindset of the newsroom isn’t. Don’t tell me what I should be reading, I’ll tell you what to feed me and if you don’t like it then goodbye.

With so many things all competing for our attention today, it’s silly to think that users are going to continue to put up with products and services that don’t deliver exactly what the user wants, when they want and in a medium that is convenient. Look at how DVR has taken this concept and changed TV. Podcasts and Pandora are doing this right now to radio. So when will newspapers change?