There are two reasons I haven’t pulled the trigger on a 3G iPhone. The new phone is almost perfect. The first reason has to do with a lack of support for an external keyboard of any kind. I believe that this phone could replace taking a laptop 90% of the time for me with the addition of a keyboard. I believe apple did this on purpose to avoid cannibalizing sales of MacBook Air.
The bigger reason though has to do with the epic failure of Mobile Me to live up to the promise. And no, I’m not referring to the dismal performance of the service (did the Twitter guys write this thing?). No, when I first read about it, I looked at pictures like the one to the left and descriptions of what the service was supposed to achieve and I made a very basic assumption about how it was going to work. That assumption has proved to be very wrong.
When I read the descriptions and look at that diagram what I see is that Mobile Me is supposed to be an aggregator. In other words, it should pull data from MS Exchange servers, my mac at home, my iPhone, whatever and then push it out to everything else. But in reality, Mobile Me is a node, a repository, not an aggregator. It passively waits for someone to push data to it. This is wrong. Why do I need a program running on my windows desktop to poll the exchange server for data and push it to mobile me? If my iTouch can connect directly to my exchange server, then why can’t mobile me connect directly to my exchange server? The connectivity to different data stores whether they be calendars, lotus notes servers, exhange servers, or pop email servers should all be happening from within mobile me. Then, mobile me needs to be the publisher of this information to my devices that want to subscribe.
Oh well. Maybe next version.
On a side note, I also find it amusing that I’ve never been able to get Mail.app to successfully connect to my corporate Exhange server. However, with the latest iPhone/iTouch software…my iTouch DOES connect to my company exchange server. What the heck is up with that??
