Apple's MobileMe

MobileMe sounded like an answer to many of my Office problems - I thought I could finally easily sync my email, calendar and contacts across my several PC's, smartphone, and iPod Touch, and do it all wirelessly.

Unfortunately, it did not do this for me. From what I've read in other blogs and reviews, I'm not the only one who is disappointed.

I could not make MobileMe copy my Outlook calendar to the cloud. It did copy my Outlook contacts mostly right, but for a few of them, it did not copy the complete contact information with all phone numbers and email addresses. And, I couldn't get it to do anything with my email that I received through other email addresses and that presently resides on my hard drive in Outlook. As best as I could tell, the only solution to my email sync problem it provided was to give me yet another email address as a consolidation point, and I already have too many of those, any of which could serve as a consolidator (if only all my contacts would use it!).

For those of you haven't yet tried MobileMe and who have the same hopes of it that I did, my recommendation is to wait. Apple usually build great stuff, and I have hopes that they will get this right. So, save your free 60 day trial for a time when the chances are much better that you will be pleased with the product.

In the meantime, use the Google Calendar Sync to solve this problem for your Outlook Calendar, and set up a Gmail account that collects email from all your POP3 mail accounts. For contacts, you'll have to periodically manually sync up Gmail and Outlook. It isn't perfect, but Google does a better job today at this problem than MobileMe did for me.

I'm rooting for Apple to get it right, and hopefully they will soon.