Mobile Me and the Cloud
Certainly the new iPhone is great news. I’ve owned an iPhone since June 29, 2007 and it’s been the best phone I’ve ever owned. It’s the first phone I’ve used every day (despite having owned a cell phone since 1996), the first phone (since a Samsung I owned in 2000) that was rock solid reliable every day, the first phone that I cherished enough to carry with me every day.
I’ll be transitioning to iPhone 3G on July 11th, but not without feeling nostalgic for the way Apple’s first iPhone changed how I view phones. (Is that too Apple-centric for your delicate tastes? Well, bite it, won’t you? Perhaps if I had owned a Blackberry, I’d be just as attached to it. But such was not my fortune. I owned a Treo 700p, which was the worst device – I went through two of them trying to get one that went longer than a couple hours without a reboot – I’ve ever purchased. Your mileage may vary; that was my experience.)
But the updated iPhone is almost secondary to the announcement (expected) of Mobile Me and the new commitment to cloud computing unveiled by Apple. I’m excited about the “push” data functionality that will extend to Mail, Contacts and Calendar. But what I’m really interested to see is how this will impact my current array of “software and cloud.”
At present:
Mail: Exchange via Outlook at work; Gmail and .Mac mainly through a browser, secondarily through Mail.app. iPhone accesses Gmail and .Mac mail through IMAP; doesn’t access Exchange.
Calendar: iCal and GCal, synced using Spanning Sync. At work, Google’s sync software keeps Outlook tuned to my GCal. iPhone gets iCal data through a thin white USB cable.
Contacts: Apple Address Book; Gmail contacts are built based on an occasional import of Address Book contacts. This is highly haphazard. Syncing through Spanning Sync’s new contact sync was marginally successful; syncing through Address Book’s new port to Gmail was successful but a big mess. A messy export from Address Book gets my contacts to Outlook. iPhone gets Address Book data through a thin white USB cable.
How will a more complete syncing experience – a more cohesive experience for all my devices, delivered by Mobile Me, assuming Apple actually delivers it – mean for my setup?
One possible scenario:
Mail: beginning next month, iPhone will work with Microsoft Exchange; OS X will extend Exchange to computers when Snow Leopard is released, apparently. That covers work email; my Gmail path may remain unchanged – IMAP; my Mobile Me email will become more compelling with “push” behind it.
Calendar: Mobile Me will maintain one calendar across my computer, iPhone, Windows PC at work and any other device I connect, potentially replacing Spanning Sync, Google’s sync software, and providing a solid challenge to the relevance of GCal in my workflow. iPhone will sync without the thin white USB cable.
Contacts: Mobile Me will easily maintain one set of contacts across all devices, including Outlook at work. And if I can get syncing with Gmail’s contact database to work the way I want it to, it will take care of Gmail, too. Again, for iPhone, no white cable needed.
What I’ve wanted for myself for a long time was the ability to put all of my stuff in the cloud and have access to it seamlessly across all devices. The first piece of that is relatively easy; the second piece has been problematic. Apple seems to be serious about giving users a new experience with the cloud, and I’ll be watching for indications that this is the case.
With those features working flawlessly, plus revamped photo sharing capabilities, document capabilities, and the doubled storage capacity of Mobile Me, it’s possible the successor to .Mac will bring us closer to Merlin Mann’s cherished .Mac dream, and bind those of us who use it more tightly into the Apple orbit, with a suite of tools that will make, to quote Merlin, your entire digital world safe, fun, ubiquitous, and flawlessly integrated.
In my personal scenario, who are the losers if this strategy works? Google Calendar, potentially Google Docs (at least as far as cloud storage of docs is concerned), Spanning Sync, Google Calendar Sync. I’m hesitant to look at my own patterns and divine some greater scenario in which Google suffers because of Mobile Me; for one thing, Google is so big, does it ever suffer? Second, Apple and Google have a great relationship and I would be surprised if their futures weren’t more tightly intertwined around apps like Google Docs, etc.
Am I right in thinking that with the new iPhone (which presumably is like its predecessors in having iPod capability) could be purchased and used exclusively as an iPod for something like $100 less than buying an iPod Touch? I may be missing something here.
Good questions! I’m not sure, but I think that will be harder to do. Apple and AT&T will do in-store activations this time around, rather than allowing at-home activates through iTunes. If this holds, I assume that it will be hard to buy the iPhone without going through activation on the spot. Others may correct me on this – please do!
As for the Touch prices – having another company (AT&T) subsidize the price of an Apple product does create a big crack in Apple’s pricing structure for the iPod products. Apple may drop the price of the Touch this summer – or give the whole iPod line a price reduction – although I wonder if the price drop will be as significant (percentage-wise) as it was with the iPhone 3G.
Thanks!
As far as contacts are concerned, Leopard (10.5.3) now syncs with Google and Yahoo’s address books: http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/05/mac-os-x-...
Thanks for the note, Rubin! Yes, the extra sync capability was added with 10.5.3, but as I noted in my post, it’s been a messy experience for many because of the lack of control one has over exactly how the sync occurs.
You don’t have to search that hard to discover all kinds of wild experiences when people checked the box and started syncing. In my instance, my 591 contacts on Address Book turned into 1207 contacts after sync – a wild orgy of duplicate and triplicate entries, and several contacts rejected because they shared a common email address.
Yes, we know why this happens, since Google’s approach to contacts is different from Apple’s. Yes, the duplicates are something you can fix, for the most part, using “merge duplicates” but to repeat what I wrote in my post: a mess – not the seamless experience one would want, if you could avoid it.
Syncing is really complicated. My hat off to companies like Spanning Sync and others that make syncing their core business.
Hey Rubin – have you been using the Google and Yahoo sync in 10.5.3? If so, how has it worked for you?
Yeah I’ve been using it since day one. Works flawlessly for me.
I gotta say, I used to be a .Mac user for years, but I cut it off last year b/c I feel Google provides a better package—for free. MobileMe sure looks good, but I won’t call it “cloud computing” until it includes an online office app.
Rubin – glad the sync worked so well for you! It’s always a different experience for everyone, but for every problem, there’s also a satisfied customer.
You hit the nail on the head – .Mac has always had slim offerings in return for $99 a year. It will be interesting to see if Mac users think it has more value when it adds new features – assuming those features are great, and that’s yet to be seen.
zz4j9m – there’s a lot of chatter today about the possibility that AT&T will sell iPhones without activation. Erica Sadun has one of the better posts as TUAW: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/06/10/iphone-3g-may-be...
good, practical ways that mme will be helping folks in the work place. I think many business people need info like this to drive home how the iPhone is now poised to fit into the work place.