The venerable and much-abused .Mac service, considered overpriced by some and an utter necessity by others, is growing up. Oh, and it works with PCs too, so if you have Macs and PCs to sync, it works.
Next month, it will become MobileMe, with features that may make it more palatable to the people who feel .Mac is too little for too much. Or not.
Current .Mac users will have a seamless conversion, and their old @.mac email and iWeb urls will work, but they will also have new @.me addresses and me.com urls. Complete information about the conversion is available on the Apple .Mac to MobileMe transition FAQ, article HT1932
Storage is doubled, in any event, and if you have purchased additional storage it will be doubled as well.
From the Transition page:
How much will my online storage increase with the upgrade?
With MobileMe, you will get twice as much storage as you did with .Mac:Individual subscription storage doubles from 10GB to 20GB.
Family Packs now get 40GB of storage: 20GB for the main account and 5GB for each of the four sub-accounts.
If you purchased a storage upgrade, it will also be upgraded at no additional charge:A 10GB storage upgrade is now 20GB. Your new total storage will be 40GB.
A 20GB storage upgrade is now 40GB. Your new total storage will be 60GB.
Note: The storage increase is effective after MobileMe launches, and may take up to 10 days to appear on all accounts.
Apple’s MobileMe site has a lot of information with demos to fully explain the features. I’ll sum them up:
Available from any Internet-connected device, MobileMe will store your email, contacts and calendars on a secure online server, called a “cloud”. It pushes them down to your Mac, PC, iPhone and iPod Touch, without any intervention from the user. It happens instantly and continuously, automatically. No need for a dock, or to push a button.
This means that I can have the same email (if I choose), contacts and calendar info on my desktop Mac, my MacBook Pro (laptop) and my iPhone, all exactly the same or updated as soon as they connect to the Internet, without thinking about it.
Unanswered question? How long does this process take, and does it slow my machine down? Don’t know yet.
The Gallery and iDisk features are not too different… except that you can upload photos from your iPhone directly to your Gallery, as well as from your computer. The interface seems to be a bit improved, but as I don’t use it much, I don’t want to be quoted on that. You can make a new album or change existing ones from pretty much anywhere that is Internet-connected and changes are “instantly reflected in your gallery”.
You can allow print-quality downloads of photos or entire albums, either as full-size JPEGS or images optimized for 16″ x 20″ prints which have a smaller file size, according to the site.
You can also allow other individuals to upload photos from a browser or email.
MobileMe Gallery works with Apple TV on a widescreen television, so a computer is not required.
iDisk is not changed in terms of its function. The under-the-hood workings may be updated, but I just don’t know.
Related posts:
- MobileMe help, billing info, phishing warning from Apple Apple updated and added knowledge base articles to help MobleMe...
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