MobileMe 1.1

Synchronization is hard. It may sound simple: copy personal information, such as contacts and events, between computers and keep them all up to date. But over the years we’ve seen sync programs that don’t quite work. I not-so-fondly remember manually deleting hundreds of duplicate contacts from my Palm handheld years ago, and even now I run into records in which separate companies and individuals were long ago squished together into the same contact.

Apple has thrown resources at this problem over time, and the latest incarnation, MobileMe, adds the capability to synchronize some data to devices and other Macs lickety-split, the way Microsoft’s Exchange Server performs in the corporate world. (In fact, Apple calls MobileMe “Exchange for the rest of us.�) MobileMe definitely comes closer to fulfilling the promise made by the six-year-old .Mac (which it replaced), though it has more than a few rough edges.

With an online service such as MobileMe, I’m writing about a moving target shortly after what turned out to be a disastrous introduction. Not only was MobileMe rolled out at the same time as the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2.0 software update�which greatly strained Apple’s overwhelmed servers during the first days�the service ran into snags days before that when it was soft-launched in advance of its grand debut. The service was frequently unavailable and synchronization often didn’t work properly. Apple apologized for the snafus and extended all MobileMe subscriptions by 30 days. So, it’s possible that the reliability of the service will improve over time.

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