With new features, Apple's MobileMe is worth the price

Apple has finally assembled a set of features for its hosted MobileMe service that makes it worth its subscription fee for the right user. As a critic of the service in the past, I find myself with naught but praise these days.

Apple's hosted service has gone through three name changes and innumerable feature modifications over its lifetime, but now has a strong appeal to many iPhone or iPod touch owners, as well as those who have Macs at multiple locations.

MobileMe (www.apple.com/mobileme/) costs $99 a year for a single account or $149 for a family pack of up to five accounts (check online retailers for cheaper rates for signup and renewal). At that price, it has been seen as expensive for an "e-mail plus" service; e-mail plus one other feature, like synchronization, was all most people wanted out of Apple. At that price, you can turn to Google or Yahoo or Microsoft, and pay nothing at all.

But Apple kept adding unique features that leverage the power in a mobile device and remote computers. An iPhone, iPod touch, and Mac become edges of the service instead of MobileMe's being just a repository of data with which you loosely interact.

MobileMe got off to a rough start when Mac was shifted to its new name, look, and feature set in mid-2008; it was so bad that Steve Jobs issued public apologies. It took months of improvements, but Apple hit its stride with its two key improvements: push-based synchronization, where changes made anywhere are pushed immediately to all other devices associated with an account; and rich Web applications for accessing data away from your own computer.

When I schedule my next haircut or physical therapy appointment, I tap it into my iPhone, and I know that I don't have to worry about it. I can access the same data from my Macs, my iPhone, and any computer with Web access, and it just works.

Since getting push and sync right, Apple continues to tie its mobile hardware more closely to MobileMe. IPhone OS 3 added Find My iPhone/iPod touch, which — when and if you choose to enable the option — continuously sends the current whereabouts of these devices to MobileMe, where only you can access the location on a map. The precision on iPhones, which have GPS radios built in, is terrifying.

This is useful for when you lose or misplace one of these expensive geegaws, or it's stolen. You can use MobileMe to play a loud sound on the iPhone or iPod touch remotely and display a message (like, "Reward! Call this number!" or "I know you took it").

More recent updates let you erase the phone remotely or set (or reset) a four-digit PIN and lock the phone. The erase operation can take as long as hours with an original iPhone or iPhone 3G that's packed with content; the 3GS uses hardware encryption and scrambles its contents in seconds. Erasing the phone disables the find feature, however.

MobileMe includes 20 GB of storage and 200 GB of monthly data transfer (downloads and uploads) as part of the basic subscription price split however you choose between e-mail and Internet storage. With a multiple-account subscription, you can divvy up storage among users, too.

That storage — labeled your iDisk — has always been a little irritating to access away from a Mac, and it wasn't simple to provide others with a way to download a file without a lot of monkeying around. Apple fixed that months ago with an option on its Web site to choose a file and then send e-mail with an optional password and expiration date. (Excellent Web site access to iDisk files began with the mid-2008 upgrade.)

This became even more useful when Apple released a free iPhone app, also called iDisk, which lets mobile device users view files, retrieve copies, and share files via the same e-mail approach as on the Web site.

For those with multiple computers, the sync features are just as useful with an iPhone or iPod touch as without. Programs like Yojimbo and TextExpander can sync stored items and shortcuts over MobileMe, too, allowing me to have the same contents at each computer I work on.

But the feature I find myself using most on a Mac is Back to My Mac, which gives me remote access over the Internet among Macs under my control.

Yes, this is the same tool to which I devoted a previous column complaining about how poorly it worked, despite its promise. That's changed. Apple has definitely improved the ability to make and keep a connection. I also use to an ISP that lets me have a publicly reachable IP address on my routers and use my own router, which is a requirement for Back to My Mac.

In the interim, Apple also extended Back to My Mac to work with any of its AirPort Extreme Base Station models released starting in 2007 or Time Capulse router/storage devices from 2008 or later. You can set up access to drives inside or attached to these base stations to Macs with the same MobileMe account.

These features finally add up to something worth the price. With an iPhone, I can often leave my laptop behind for short trips, and the MobileMe features mean that the critical files or other data that I rely on are available at my fingertips.

And when I'm traveling, if I need quick access to any of my computers, I can fire up a Guest account on a friend's Mac, log in to MobileMe, and have my remote screen and files at my fingertips.

Glenn Fleishman writes the Practical Mac column for Personal Technology and about technology in general for The Seattle Times and other publications. Send questions to gfleishman@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists