Get the benefits of MobileMe for Cheap (or free)

I’ve been investigating ways to obtain the push email, contact, and calendar synchronization of MobileMe without subscribing to its $99 a year price. For those of you that don’t know what Apple’s MobileMe is, it is a service that offers users push email (@mac.com & @me.com domains), push calendar, push contacts, push pictures, and push bookmark synchronization to/from the iPhone and Apple’s MobileMe servers in the cloud. It doesn’t, however, offer push sync from a Mac or Windows-based computer, but the MobileMe software will sync with the cloud every fifteen minutes. Additionally, the service provides some slick web interfaces to these functions (mail, calendar, contacts) that mimic the look and feel of Apple’s desktop apps (Mail, iCal, and Address Book) and a web gallery app that allows the easy creation of online photo galleries from pictures uploaded from your computer or pushed directly from the pictures you’ve taken on your iPhone. Furthermore, the rebranded .Mac service still retains the iDisk cloud storage space and provides space to publish iWeb created websites, but adds no further new features to these. Now, let me take a look at these individually, and explore ways of achieving the same effect without MobileMe.

Email: First, lets look at email. I operate my own domain, and use Google Apps for Custom Domains and Gmail to host my email accounts. This provides me with an exceptional email service, with a lot of storage space, and a nice web interface (although not as Mac-specific as MobileMe’s webmail app). Obviously, the best solution for myself and the many millions of other Gmail users in a similar situation would be for Google to offer its own push service (compatible with the iPhone, of course, barring Apple’s support), to offer MS Exchange Direct Push (which is now supported in iPhone 2.0 software), or for Apple to enable IMAP Idle support in the iPhone Mail app, which would offer push-like functionality and be compatible with Google’s mail servers. But, Google doesn’t offer push or exchange support, at least at this point, and the iPhone doesn’t support IMAP idle, which leads all of us searching for another solution. Thankfully, Gmail allows its users to forward all incoming email to another email address. If you already have access to an exchange server, you can forward your mail there and have it push it to your iPhone. If not, you can sign up for a personal exchange host online for free or low cost depending on the services you require (typically between $4.99 and $10.99 a month). I personally use a free Exchange service called Mail2Web (which also offers an upgraded version for $4.99 a month). The only inconvenience of such an approach is having to manage duplicate emails: one set on Gmail and one on the exchange server. I still use Gmail as my main account, and Mail2web serves only as somewhat of an email notification service. It would be nice, however, if the changes on one would sync with the other, but this inconvenience is a small price to pay for push mail if you don’t manage large amounts of mail per day. There are two other services available which promise to be able to synchronize a Gmail POP/IMAP account while providing a push mail through Exchange Direct Push, but I haven’t had success with one (mobiPush) and the other has yet to launch email sync (NuevaSync).

Note: I’ve had a few problems with Mail2web, such as long wait times to send mail (not immediate). I’ll post on any further problems I may experience.

Calendar & Contacts: Any Exchange server should provide you with a calendar and address book where changes gets pushed to and from your iPhone to the server. The problem, then, would be getting Exchange to sync with iCal and Address Book on your Mac or GCal and Gmail Contacts on the web. I have yet to find a solution to allow iCal to sync with Exchange (hopefully this will be built into 10.6 Snow Leopard), but its easy to do with Address Book (just enable Exchange sync; note that pictures in vcards pose a problem). I haven’t had much of a chance to research Google-Exchange sync, but will update this when and if I find an answer. Its possible, I suppose, to sync iCal to Gcal and then sync Gcal to Exchange? Likewise, perhaps one could sync Address Book with Google (possible with 10.3.3), and then sync Google to Exchange? Finally, NuevaSync supposedly offers and Exchange server that syncs with your Google Calendar and Contacts, but I haven’t been able to test it out yet. Note that its only possible to have 1 Exchange server configured on the iPhone at one time, so if you use Nuevasync for Contacts or Calendar, you can’t use another service for email (Nuevasync would be perfect once email gets up and running, assuming it works).

Note: Interestingly, it seems as though Calendars pushed/synced through MobileMe are not editable on the iPhone, which seems to defeat the purpose. I don’t know why this would be, since I thought Apple was using Exchange for MobileMe. Anyway, I will research this and update.

Photos: It’s not push, and it doesn’t sync with iPhoto over the air, but there are a few different 3^rd-party iPhone apps that allow uploading of pictures to various photo sites. This provides similar instant publishing functionality to MobileMe. I’ll update this once I test a few of the different apps.

Bookmarks: MobileMe offers bookmark push to and from the iPhone to the cloud (and then syncs every 15 minutes with your Mac), but doesn’t provide a web interface anymore to view your bookmarks. Unfortunately, I haven’t yet found a way to synchronize bookmarks with iPhone Safari over the air; nonetheless push bookmark updates to/from the iPhone. It’s technically possible for third party apps to provide such functionality, but I think accessing and modifying Safari’s bookmark store would violate Apple’s SDK terms, and thus would never be approved. Unless this changes, I assume the closest we will get will be 3^rd-party app interfaces to web bookmark service (like del.ic.ious), and perhaps an app that syncs with your bookmarks and provides a bult-in webkit browser that could be used as a Mobile Safari replacement.

iDisk (and offline access/sync): Coming Soon

Back To My Mac: Coming Soon

iWeb and Site Publishing: Coming Soon