Confirming the rumors, Steve Jobs today announced MobileMe-a new service for managing and syncing data online and across machines that replaces Apple’s .Mac service.
All your information is stored online, “in the cloud,” as they call it. Every time you update data, it pushes those updates up and down to the cloud and your different client machines. It works with the iPhone’s contacts, calendar, etc.-meaning you don’t have to connect your iPhone to your Mac, for instance, for it to sync with your calendar/contact/etc. data-as well as all your standard Mac and PC apps: Mail.app, iCal, and Address book for the Mac; and Outlook for Windows. They’ve also built AJAX-based web apps for Mail and Calendar.
A run-down of the services, via Macworld’s coverage:
Calendar - You can navigate by day, month, week view. You can turn on the color-coded interface. And you can just drag and drop events to move them around. Here’s a look at the gallery; you can skim through photos just like in iPhoto. You can rotate photos, drag them around, etc. You can password protect your photos if you like.
Contacts - “It lets you scroll through them, navigate your groups, and there’s a live search: as you type, it filters your contacts. You can click on addresses and it gives you an embedded Google Map.”
Email gets pushed immediately to the iPhone; there’s also web-based iDisk access, allowing you to drag-and-drop files for simple management.
MobileMe comes with 20GB of online storage, and will be available at Me.com in early July for $99 a year. .Mac users will be automatically upgraded to MobileMe and can switch over whenever they want.
We’ll provide more info as we get it.
(Be sure to check out Macworld’s live coverage of the WWDC keynote.)
Update: Apple has posted the full details-included a video guided tour-of MobileMe.
I hope to God they're fixing the horrible speed of .Mac. It's the #1 reason why I stopped paying for it after the first year and never looked back.