Apple may be a lot more forthcoming about what they’re doing in the background to fix MobileMe these days, but that doesn’t mean they’ve sorted out all issues with the perpetually sketchy service. According to a post on Royal Pingdom, visitors to the MobileMe homepage yesterday were greeted with a very unfriendly error message: “Not Found: Resource does not exist.” Not the most amusing way to greet your customers, I can tell you that.
Apparently, it was some issue with the domain name and not the service itself. Typing ‘http://me.com/mail’ in the address bar would take you to your MobileMe inbox as you’d expect it to, but both ‘http://me.com’ and ‘http://www.me.com’ were inaccessible. The outage lasted almost seven hours, from 2:29 AM EST to 9:25 AM EST.
As should be evident from the nature of the problem, none of MobileMe services were hampered and anyone who didn’t visit the web version of MobileMe yesterday, like me, shouldn’t have noticed any glitches at all. Apple hasn’t posted any information about this latest hiccup with MobileMe anywhere. We’re expecting some mention of it on a support page six months from now. Or not.
[Via TUAW]
The service hasn't been all bad. It's been good enough for day to day usage. Having said that, is it good enough to pay $99 a year when there are very good free alternatives?
I recently shared why I switched back to GMail and other tools at the end of my trial: http://theweeklyreview.ca/2008/10/31/mobile-me-alternatives/
In the last couple of days, calendar events have not been syncing from my computer and the MM web interface to my iPhone. Very frustrating, since it's the phone that I always have with me to beep and tell me about the next appointment.
I must be doing something wrong. I have had absolutely NO issues with MobileMe at all. And I do not live in Cupertino either; I am out here in Nashville TN. So far, it has worked very well synching stuff back and forth between an iPhone, a MacBook, and an aging Mac Mini.
As for using GMail: all the freebies have a gotcha, and in their case it is their freely-admitted policy of data-mining. No thanks. That, and their impossible email interface. Perhaps they changed it, but I gave up on GMail long ago.
MobileMe works fine for me. It combines a lot of neat little services that make it worthwhile IMO. Backup space, calendar/contact syncing, *ridiculously* easy photo/movie gallery creation/maintenance, etc.
My one issue is its webmail client. Gmail's webmail is entire nebulae superior to MM's.