If you bought your iPhone at an Apple Store, you probably got a little sales pitch on MobileMe to go with it. If you declined at the time because you weren’t sure exactly what MobileMe could do for you or if you’re thinking about subscribing to the service now, this guide is for you. We’ll go over what MobileMe offers to iPhone users in particular in this installment of our Learning iPhone series.
Apple describes MobileMe in a nutshell on their site here like this:
MobileMe is a service that pushes new email, contacts, and calendar events over the air to all your devices. So your iPhone, Mac, and PC stay in perfect sync. No docking required.
What does that mean exactly? You can already sync everything between your iPhone and your computer via USB, so why get MobileMe, right? Well, MobileMe offers a few features that will be particularly useful to iPhone users who are worried about finding their iPhone in case they lose it, as well as those who have multiple computers across which they want to keep their contacts and calendars synchronized.
Find your lost iPhone
This particular feature has garnered a fair amount of press as MobileMe users located and got back lost or stolen iPhones once it was released over the summer, like this account by a happy MobileMe user who got his iPhone back in Chicago.
While we don’t recommend that you track down your iPhone and demand it back from a thief on your own, being able to locate your iPhone with this service could be invaluable if you tend to misplace your cell phone or if you happen to be around someone with sticky fingers someday.
How does it work, you ask? Once you get an iPhone and subscribe to MobileMe, you simply set up your MobileMe account on your iPhone – you’ll get a walk-through on this page in Settings/Mail-Contacts-Calendar/Add Account:
After this, you simply need to turn on the Find My iPhone feature in the account detail page:
You can locate your iPhone by going to www.me.com and logging in to your account there, then clicking on the icon in the top left that looks like a small green radar screen (the second to last one, left to right):
You’ll be asked for your MobileMe account password again and then you’ll see a screen that will show the location of your iPhone on a map. Your iPhone must be online to be found. This works with all iPhone models but is more accurate with the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS since they have GPS chips that the service can use to find them.
The MobileMe service also lets you send a message to your iPhone that will be displayed on the screen, with or without an accompanying alert sound. You can also lock your iPhone with a 4-digit passcode or even do a remote wipe so all of your data is erased in case it truly gets into the wrong hands or you’re worried that it will.
Over-the-air synchronization
While you’ll always need to connect your iPhone to sync music and videos, MobileMe can make it so that your contacts and calendar will sync automatically over-the-air as needed. This means that you can make changes to your contacts or calendar on your iPhone or Mac/PC (more than one of each – there’s technically no limit to the number of computers) and the change will be reflected on the other device(s) without needing to connect them physically.
While this may not be a do-or-die ability to some, it can be quite useful if you rarely sync your iPhone with your computer and don’t want to worry about which device has the latest information. Plus, while it’s not an official back-up system, it can be handy in a pinch in case something happens to your computer or your iPhone – you can find your most recent contact and calendar information through the MobileMe site that can be accessed from any computer with an internet connection or on another device you have that uses your MobileMe account.
Push email
A single user MobileMe account comes with a primary email address (and the ability to create email aliases) and it’s a push account, which means that any new emails will automatically be pushed to your iPhone and computer without either of them needing to proactively reach out to the server to gather them. Again, this may not be a critical feature to many, but if you’re an email fiend who wants to be able to read new emails the moment they arrive, this will be handy.
The cost
Apple sells a 1-year single-user MobileMe subscription for US $99. It can be had for up to half that, though, if you search diligently on Amazon or eBay. eBay can be a bit tricky – we’ve heard of illegal sales of MobileMe sub-accounts there (someone essentially selling out parts of the multi-user Family Pack subscription that Apple offers for $149 – so Amazon may be a better bet.
If you want to give it a try before buying, Apple offers a 60-day free trial that you can sign up for here.
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That’s it for this Learning iPhone installment. We’ll cover more on MobileMe’s set-up and capabilities in a future article for a deeper dive into this Apple offering.
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Given that the emphasis on this article is the iPhone and not on MobileMe, I am surprised that you neglected to mention alternatives. When it was first introduced, MobileMe had the monopoly on Push and Sync Over-The-Air, but especially with the update to OS 3.0 this is hardly the case. Anyone with an Exchange account can sync email, contacts, and calendar OTA, including Google’s Gmail version that goes through Exchange or services like NuevaSync; and many webapp calendars can be sync’d OTA by using CalDAV, etc.
MobileMe is awesome for its Find and Wipe options, and could be worth $99 for some for that alone. But it seems to me you should at least mention that it is not the only option for the other highlighted features, even if you don’t go into those options in this article.
This is a great program but it stalls and runs slow often on desk top when trying to open information or add info. I can add info much faster in Aol, Yahoo or Outlook but I still use Mobile Me because of the push & wireless sync. Please fix the slowness & stalling. I have the same problem on my lap top and desk top both.