1. Go to http://me.com/activate
2. Choose “Apply to an existing account” and enter your code
   
   
3. Sign in with your Mobileme account name and password when prompted
   

And that’s it!

If you now go to your account page, you should see the new expiration date a year from now.

Q: I’ve got two weeks left on my account – should I renew now anyway?

A: Your new subscription’s year starts immediately and doesn’t count towards any time left on your last subscription. So if you have a while left before your subscription ends, wait until it’s almost expired.

Support the site and save a few bucks:

Purchase MobileMe (Individual) on Amazon.com

Purchase MobileMe (Family) on Amazon.com

In my post Free alternatives to MobileMe earlier this year, I looked at some free alternatives to Apple’s MobileMe service. One crucial piece was still missing though: The seamless over-the-air syncing and push email experience offered by MobileMe on the iPhone.

Google Sync – the Missing Piece of the Puzzle?

MobileMe’s biggest advantage to date has been its support for push email and over-the-air syncing, which ensures that emails and changes to calendars and contacts are synced to iPhone users instantly.

But with Google Sync, Google aims to offer GMail and Google Calendar  users the same over-the-air syncing feature that MobileMe does. To accomplish this, Google is basically taking advantage of the fact that the iPhone (and most other smartphones) natively support Microsoft Exchange syncing. So Google are offering their own Exchange-compatible service, that acts as an intermediary between your data stored in Google’s services and your iPhone. Configure Google Sync as a new exchange account on your iPhone, enable Push support and Google will Push any new email messages, calendar or contact updates to your phone.

When you consider that iCal, Address Book and Mail on the Mac also natively support syncing with Google’s services, Google Sync starts to look like a very interesting alternative to MobileMe. Change a contact in Address Book or add an appointment to iCal  and those changes should be synced right up to your phone, without requiring a slow, USB iTunes sync – just like MobileMe. Emails should also be delivered right away, circumventing the 15 minute fetching interval limit. Or as Google sums it up it a cutesy comic:

But how well does it work in the real world?

Setting up Google Sync on your phone isn’t particularly difficult and Google offers easy step-by-step instructions. Enter your details, ignore a certificate warning, enter some more details and you’re done.

Emails

But mysteriously my Gmail inbox would only show 3 messages I had received this morning, with no sign of any messages I had received earlier in the week or later today. The same problem affected my other mailboxes as well. I was able to coax a few more messages off the server by selecting to only sync a week’s worth of email messages, but that does severely limit habitual emails hoarders such as myself. A know current limitation of the service is also the fact that drafts can’t be edited, once synced.

Contacts

My Google contacts showed up fairly quickly in my Contacts application. But new contacts didn’t seem to sync back up to Gmail, no matter how often I tried to coax Google Sync into action.

Conclusion

Judging by the discussions going on over on the Google Sync messageboards, it looks as though the service has been pretty flaky for users the last few days, so these are most likely serious teething issues. But until these reliability problems are sorted out, it’s hard to realistically see Google Sync as a serious MobileMe alternative anytime soon.

Having said that, it’s promising to see Google taking the initiative and trying to offer an Exchange-like experience for non-corporate / non-MobileMe user – so Google gets a gold star for trying. It’s also worth remembering that MobileMe (a $99 per year service) had its own fair share of teething issues, so let’s hope Google is able to really challenge Apple in this area in the near future.

But for the time being, I’ll be sticking with regular Gmail IMAP syncing for my emails and MobileMe syncing for my contacts and calendars.

Mail alternative: Gmail

I’ve never been willing to lock myself into a $99 / year e-mail service, simply because my main e-mail address is something I’d like to be able to keep indefinitely. Gmail can collect (and send) e-mails from a variety of providers and addresses, offers free IMAP support (a must-have for iPhone owners!) and doesn’t include advertising in the messages you send. The storage is basically unlimited and nothing is ever deleted.

Pros: No ads in mails, best-of-breed webmail interface, IMAP support, works great with Mail and iPhone once configured

Cons: IMAP mailbox configuration a bit tricky

Calender Alternative: Google Calendar

Surprise surprise, another Google app! Google Calendar offers basically the same range of features and can be configured to sync with iCal (Google actually provides a handy tool called ‘Calaboration‘ to set things up for you automatically). Perks include free SMS appointment reminders, simple calendar sharing and fast natural language scheduling (e.g typing “Dinner tomorrow at 9pm” will schedule the appointment accordingly).

The web interface is a little less pretty than MobileMe’s, but it gets the job done.

Pros: SMS notifications, iCal integration, CalDAV support, natural language entry, useful “Agenda” list view of upcoming events

Cons: -

iDisk Alternative: Dropbox

I’ve raved about Dropbox in a number of other posts, so I won’t rehash to much of the details here. Suffice to say that Dropbox has the best cloud-based document syncing and storage service I’ve come across. It’s integration with the Finder is perfect, it offers seamless version control and makes sharing with Windows & Linux users a breeze as well.

The only real difference is the storage size – but it’s a big one: While free Dropbox accounts can sync up to 2GB of files, Mobileme offers 20GB of storage. Beyond the free plan, Dropbox also offers a 50GB package, but that costs as much as Mobileme does.

If you don’t need to sync and store large amounts of data in the cloud, Dropbox is perfect. If you do need more storage, then Mobileme is worth reconsidering.

Pros: Seamless cross-platform OS integration, easy sharing, version control & “undelete”

Cons: Only 2 pricing tiers, web-interface a bit tricky at first

Photo Gallery Alternative

Mobileme’s iPhoto Gallery feature is probably my favorite aspect of the entire package. The galleries are a little slow to load, but are very nicely presented. The ability to download an entire Zip file of an album is also a nice touch and the iPhone presentation is the icing on the cake.

But there’s a plethora of picture sharing websites out there that offer similar functionality: I’m just going to name a few that stand out for their decent iPhoto integration:

• Facebook Photo Gallery
  • Pros: built-in iPhoto support, support for Faces, fast & simple web presentation
  • Cons: no album downloading, requires Facebook account
• Picasa Web Albums
  • Pros: Dedicated upload tool, album downloading, 3rd party application support
  • Cons: less storage space, uglier web interface
• Flickr
  • Pros: Community-features, built-in iPhoto support, nice web presentation
  • Cons: Limited monthly uploads and image downloads for free accounts

Overall this might the dealbreaker if you really need to share a lot of images with friends online. Sure, you could always just throw a zip file of your images on your Dropbox account (see above), but if there’s one standout feature of Mobileme, this is it.

Conclusion

There are lots of great alternatives for Mobileme’s individual services worth checking out. Whilst they may not offer the integration that Mobileme does, they sure give the service a run for its money and are worth a look if you’re on the fence about signing up or renewing your account.

Oh, but if you do decide to stick with Mobileme, you can save a bundle if you buy it through Amazon.

I decided to time exactly how long it takes for a Gmail message to be pushed to the iPhone over Wifi and over GPRS / EDGE:

Whilst 60 days might not seem like a huge deal, it does show a certain amount of goodwill on Apple’s part and a willingness to put things right. More importantly this comes at a point when most glitches seem to have been worked out, so this news should be received much more positively than the initial 30 day extension some members were offered previously.

Link to Apple’s Knowledgebase for full details.

1. Log into MobileMe
2. Click the Accounts button at the top of the window:
   
3. Select “Account Options” from the menu on the left
   
4. There you should see a “Cancel Account” button towards the bottom of the window. Click it to cancel your subscription.

But despite all the negative press, I must say the MobileMe webapps look great and feel very desktop-like. I think the service is suffering a bit from “Vista-itis”, so lets hope the initial bad publicity doesn’t doom this product too.

I hope this has helped some of you! If you enjoyed this article – support the site and buy yourself something nice at Amazon.

“I have just checked my card account online and apple have put a £121 pending transaction on the card! that’s not even 1 years subscription.”

Link to the relevant Apple Support Discussion thread.

I suppose it helps to prevent people from “freeloading” by using multiple email addresses to use the service for multiple trial periods, but I find it hard to imagine anyone actually bothering to do that (especially considering some of mobileme’s features have excellent free alternatives). But I’m sure some people who have a more casual interest in the new services and want to ‘try before they buy‘ may be inclined to not bother signing up for a trial because of this.

Ideally I see a trial model where users are encouraged to enter Credit Card details, but are presented with a simple dialog window at the end of the trial period that offers a single-click option to automatically upgrade to a full membership. Sure, Apple would miss out on a few customers that simply forget to cancel the subscription, but I think the customers retained anyway would appreciate the entire experience all the more due to the “pro-customer” approach.

Not only did the 10.5.3 update introduce a placeholder for the word “.mac” in various locations across the system, the domains “me.com” and “mobileme.com” are both apparently being held for Apple. 
(Perhaps Apple will also try to nab one of those fancy new Montenegrin “.me” domains – “mobile.me”.)

So here’s my predictions for some of the changes we’ll see to .mac:

• iPhone integration: Syncing of notes, todos and other 3rd party apps with their counterparts on your Mac.  
   
• “Back to my Mac”: An iPhone “Back to my Mac” client as well as the ability to “send” download links from mobileSafari to your Mac at home  
   
• iWeb integration: A mobile blogging client that will allow you to post to your iWeb blog from your iPhone. (As featured on this patent application mockup of the iPhone interface)
    
• Price reduction: I could see them dropping the cost to $49 or $79 a year – a much better price point that would be easier to swallow for most users.

Obviously some of those are quite speculative, but hey – I can dream, right?