MobileMe Mail

MobileMe comes with the Mail service. It works pretty much the same as the other web based email client except it comes with the push service for the iPhone/iPod Touch. It shares with the 20GB storage with the standard MobileMe account and you can pay more to increase the storage size. MobileMe Mail supports IMAP for incoming emails and SMTP for outgoing emails. However, MobileMe Mail does not have email filtering and the spam filter sucks.

There are a lot of free solution to replace MobileMe Mail. As all we know, Gmail (Google Mail) is the best free email web client right now. It comes with about 7+ GB storage and it supports filtering, labeling, folder, etc. The most important features are FREE and AWESOME spam control. Gmail supports POP3 and/or IMAP for incoming email and SMTP for outgoing emails. There are uncountable number of features and new features are adding in via Google Lab almost every month. Although IMAP is not true pushing technology, it works well with iPhone/iPod Touch.

MobileMe Contact

MobileMe Contact works very well with Mac OS X’s Address Book application via MobileMe Sync. It supports international format of address and phone number. Also, you can add almost unlimited number of fields into the address book. For example, you can have multiple home phone numbers and multiple work email addresses. This is a very useful features and a lot of other address book applications are missing that.

Similar to Mail, Contact is a push service for iPhone/iPod Touch as well. Alternative solution could be Gmail Contacts, which comes with the Gmail account. Mac OS X Address Book supports syncing with Google Contact natively. However, I don’t have good experience with that because the fields in OS X Address Book are different with Google Contacts. Occasionally, the sync screws up my contact information. This is one of the reasons I don’t want to give up the expensive MobileMe account.

In addition, Google just releases Google Sync Beta for iPhone/iPod Touch yesterday. I don’t have a chance to try it yet but it seems could be the other alternative solution to sync Google Contact with iPhone/iPod Touch.

MobileMe Calendar

Same as MobileMe Contact, the MobileMe Calendar works almost perfectly with iCal (Birthday calendar and subscribed calendar don’t work together via MobileMe Sync). On the other hand, Google Calendar is still a big winner on free calendar solution. Also, we can use the newly released Google Sync to synchronize between iPhone/iPod Touch with Google Calendar and using 3rd party solution such as Spanning Sync with iCal on the Desktop/Notebook.

MobileMe Gallery

I don’t use MobileMe Gallery that much because I am using Flickr and Smugmug for most of my photography works. MobileMe Gallery works the best with iLife’s iPhoto and iPhone. For the alternative solution, we can use Flickr’s free account or Google Web Picasa. Google Picasa works even better than iPhoto and it’s FREE as well.

[smartads]

MobileMe iDisk

iDisk is always a problem since the day it was introduced back in the late 90′s. It shares the same storage space with the MobileMe storage, which is around 20GB. The syncing mechanism is slow and problematic. For the past few years, I have encountered at least 3 times of corrupt synching and forced me to cleanup everything. iDisk was a simple WebDav implementation and now it turns into a cloud service.

There is rumor about Google is working on GDrive. As a result, there is no Google solution for this feature. However, we can use Drop Box. The free Drop Box account comes with 2GB storage. The client supports Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux! Drop Box also supports version control so you can always rollback the deleted files instantly from the web client.

MobileMe Sync

MobileMe allows synchronizing data (contact, calendar, keychain, bookmark, dashboard, gadgets, and other 3rd applications data) across multiple Mac’s. I found out synchronizing contact and calendar are the most useful features. I don’t sync the keychain because I don’t want to mix up the keys between work and home accounts. I don’t sync the dashboard and gadgets because I have different setup for work and home. As for the bookmark, since I mainly use FireFox 3 instead of Safari, it is no use at all.

As I mentioned earlier, Google just released Google Sync for Mobile Device. It solves the issues about synchronizing contact and calendar between desktop/notebook and mobile devices. For bookmark, the best alternative solution is Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. It supports both Safari and FireFox 3. Besides synchronizing the bookmarks, the Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer also syncs the username/password acrossing different computers/browsers.

Back to My Mac

This feature never works for me. It could be I’m using a modified Linksys router instead of Apple Airport. However, I can use either Chicken of the VNC or LogMeIn. Both of the applications/services are free and works across platforms (Mac OS X / Windows / Linux).

iLife

iLife integrates pretty well with MobileMe. For example, iPhoto can publish photos to MobileMe Gallery and iWeb can create simple web site and publish to MobileMe. However, I don’t use any of these features at all.

iWorks ’09

iWorks can utilize MobileMe for online sharing documents. I don’t have a copy of iWorks 09 so I do not know too much about this feature. However, alternative solution could be Google Docs. I have been using Google Docs for quite awhile to replace MS Office. It works pretty good for simple document editing. With the help of Google Gears, Google Docs can be worked standalone offline.

Other Applications

There are a lot of Mac OS X applications are utilizing MobileMe for data backup and sharing. It’s a nice touch but I don’t think it’s really important for daily usage.

Conclusion

By using Google Apps (Google Mail, Google Contacts, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sync for Mobile) and some 3rd party solutions (Flickr, Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer, Spanning Sync, LogMeIn), I can replace MobileMe by paying nothing.

What about you? Are you going to give up your MobileMe account? Please comment below.

The 2009 Acura TSX’s technology package includes the navigation system (with XM traffic and weather), premium sound, USB port (iPod integration), aux audio port, and cellular phone integration (by bluetooth). According to Acura’s handsfreelink site, TSX only supports a very limited features with the Apple iPhone. One of the most important features, phonebook import, is not supported according to the site.

However, it seems my TSX can import my 400+ contacts from my iPhone to the navigation system without any major problems (the import stops once it reaches to the contacts that use non-English characters). Since the Apple iPhone doesn’t support contact transfer using bluetooth, I cannot send selected contacts to my TSX. Also, once you have imported the contacts from the iPhone contacts into the TSX cellular phonebook, you cannot modify/edit/delete individual contacts with the car phonebook. It is very inconvienent.

Setup the iPhone with the TSX is easy. Here is how you do it:

1. Have your car key in position I or II.
2. Push the phone call button on the steering wheel and say “Phone Setup”
3. Push the phone call button and say “Pairing”
4. Have your iPhone ready
5. Make sure the bluetooth is on and in discovery mode (Settings | General | Bluetooth)
6. Push the phone call button and say a 4 digit as the pairing code you need to enter to your iPhone
7. A dialog will display on your iPhone. Enter the 4 digit code you just said to the car
8. Done

The TSX has 2 phonebooks in real, one in the navigation system and one in the car. You can assign voice tag with the phone numbers that are stored in the car. In order to enter phone number into the car phonebook, you can use bluetooth contact transfer (not support by iPhone), voice, or import from the navigation phonebook.

Personally, I don’t suggest you using voice to input the phone number. The voice recognition system (built by IBM) has no problem to recognize the numbers I said to it but it has difficulty to recognize the single word “ENTER” (you have to say it at the end of the phone number so the system can save it into memory). If you have other phone that support bluetooth contact transfer, you can use it to “beam” the phone number into the car phonebook.

1. Push the call button on the steering whell and say “Phonebook”
2. Push the call button and say “Transfer a contact”
3. “Beam” the phone number using a non-iPhone phone via bluetooth
4. The car will ask you to give a voice tag
5. Push the call button and say the voice tag
6. Push the call button and say “Yes” if the system accepts your voice tag. Sometimes, the system will reject your voice tag if it sounds too close to some other words.
7. Done

You can also transfer the phone number from the navigation system’s phonebook after you import the contacts from your iPhone.

1. Push the Info button on the dashboard
2. Use the dial to select Cellular Phonebook
3. Use the dial to select Import Phonebook
4. Make sure your iPhone has enough battery if you have a huge contact list (like mine). I have 400+ contacts and it takes about 10-15 minutes to finish the import
5. After the contacts are import into the system. You can use the dial to select Search Phonebook
6. Pick the phonebook you just import or any other phonebook you have import previously. Totally, you can import 6 phonebooks
7. Use the dial and virtual keyboard (or voice) to locate your contact and phone number
8. Push the dial to right so you can import the selected number into the car’s phonebook
9. Push the call button on the steering wheel and give the selected number a voice tag
10. Push the call button and say “Yes” if the system accepts your voice tag
11. Repeat #7 if needed
12. Done

(07/22/2008 Update: Importing the contact list into the navigation system doesn’t work anymore after I upgraded my iPhone to 2.0. I suspect it will be the same for the iPhone 3G as well.)

(07/25/2008 Update: I tried to use my Mac to send vcard via OBEX to the car. It seems not working at all. Acura is not implementing the correct OBEX for vcard transfer or the OBEX in Acura is old version. The make the problem even interesting, my car discovered my iPhone 2.0 after I played with it for 30 minutes and it downloaded the phonebook from my phone. OK, I am totally lost about how the whole thing connect together.)

(02/08/2009 Update: I copied the article from my old blog site.)