July 24th, 2008
Mossberg: MobileMe Is Far Too Flawed To Be Reliable
In a scathing indictment of Apple’s MobileMe service, the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg calls the service “far too flawed to be reliable.”
The US$99 per year service – which is supposed to push contacts, calendars and email from iPhone to computer – has been hobbling along on one leg since it’s admitted “rocky start” when it was launched two weeks ago.
The planned iDisk File Sharing featured was delayed and subscribers have reported email outtages and problems with syncing and uploading files to MobileMe galleries. Apple’s discussion boards have 1,756 pages of “discussions” about MobileMe. Things got so bad that Apple gave a free month of service to all MobileMe subscriber’s in a rare, conciliatory email.
We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge.
On Friday, 18 July 2008 Apple divulged that:
We experienced a serious issue with one of our MobileMe mail servers… Affected members are unable to send or receive email at www.me.com or access email using any email client software such as Mail on a Mac or Microsoft Outlook on a PC.
The MobileMe status page has been stuck on “1% of MobileMe members cannot access MobileMe Mail” for almost a week.
Now the pope of Mac journalism says that MobileMe “has too many flaws to keep its promises” and is “way too ragged.” Ouch.
I have only used MobileMe lightly since its launch, intentionally staying away from the service until things smooth out a little bit, but I feel for users that use it for their primary email service. Let’s hope that Apple gets all the bugs worked out soon. Maybe next time they’ll consider a larger beta testing pool and or a staggered/tiered rollout?
How’s your experience with MobileMe so far?
