And BTW, nice to meet you the other night – I didn’t put your face with your name until later…

My take on Mobilme is that it will hopefully take some of the headaches out of email, contacts and calendaring (and the syncing of these, which I also do at present):

First of all, the idea that you ‘check’ your email will eventually be only as relevant a phrase as ‘dialing’ a phone is today (we’ll still use it, but it may mean something slightly different). We have a lot of habits and rituals that are connected with the current limitations of email; when I get home or to a hotel room when I’m on a trip, the first thing I do is awaken (or startup) my laptop, connect to the Internet, and download email messages. Now, with email being pushed to all of my email devices at the same time, I may not have to do that same ritual, or at least, not need to find out what I have waiting for me; rather to answer the messages that I couldn’t answer from my phone or any other computer I had access while out during the day.

For contacts and calendars, the change will be less dramatic; no longer will I have to remember to re-enter an address, or to sync with .Mac. Anything I enter at all times into my calendar and contacts will go ‘into the cloud’, and subsequently get pushed down to all devices from there. Of course, this scheme does rely on a dependable, consistent Internet connection, but I’ve had a lot better success in that area here in Vancouver than I ever did in Boston.

As for the offline storage, I’ve been quite happy with using iDisk as a way to shuttle files from a PC at work (when I was at IBM) to my Macs at home. I’ll probably keep using it that way, and being able to generate and email to have a file available for download by a friend or family member will be a nice addition.

All in all, it looks slicker and more polished than Google’s offering (and more integrated into the OS – having the iDisk as a top level link always available in save file dialogs is always a nice amenity.) Still, polish isn’t everything, and Google Calendar, gmail, 30-boxes and some of the online file services are pretty good. Hopefully MobileMe will get the details right; for something like this, it’s what makes all the difference.

I’ve actually been thinking of dropping .Mac in favour of Google’s stuff and maybe some sort of online storage. It would be cheaper, but MobileMe seems like it addresses my major complaints.