First of all if you do not have multiple computers, an iPhone/iPod Touch, and are happy with POP (you are crazy) and IMAP email, than you have very little reason to use this service and would most likely be disappointed with the $99 you spent on it (as most of these functions can be done for free with Dropbox, an amazing service by the way!).

However with an iPhone in particular, your contacts and calendars can now be in sync without physically syncing your device. I can assure you that this works, this leads to my horror story (that is not scary, or really that bad). For about a month my contacts were not syncing, nor calendar/mail and I was very angry but had wasn’t really using those services (the email was a second one that I rarely used) that much anyway so it was not something that I needed to fix. I had heard that they had undergone improvements but still noticed this problem. One day I was tweaking setting in my “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” setting on my iPhone and decided to turn off and turn on the functions on my Mobile Me account. And it began to work as intended from then on.

This was a mild case and some were much worse, but I have yet to hear of anything since about October of last year.

Now onto why I like the service. It’s intentions were great, and now Mobile Me is living up to those original intentions. All of my computers and devices are up to date. Each of my calendars is in sync, and so are my contacts. But most of all, each of the services are instant (on the computers there is system that syncs often but not instantly, which is a negative, but is very frequent and usually isn’t a problem.) For anyone with an iPhone, with a Mac and highly recommend that buy Mobile Me. (PC support to good but not as strong as on the Mac from what I have heard, I have not tested it myself though)

Here is a basic rating.

9.1

Pros – Everything about the service.

Negatives – Mac syncing is not instant.

Now an overview of the particulars.

Price: At $99 this price is steep just for the use of an iDisk; but with Contacts, Calendars, and Mail syncing especially with an iPhone this price is reasonable.

Features and Polish: The service is very Apple like, as you would expect and has a very clean and effective user interface. The features are extensive, read them here.

Update: In addition, the newly added “Find My iPhone” feature nearly makes the $99 subscription worth it, alone. In essence it can find your iPhone via GPS (or cell triangulation) and send a message to the phone. As well as remotely wipe the phone.

RUMOR: (CONFIRMED) Within the 3.0 firmware there is an option to upload video to Mobile Me, thus just another extension of the service making it even more valuable.

Final Comments.

(At launch this would have recieved about a 5.0-5.5, just to show you how it has improved)

So the real question is this a worthy replacement to .Mac, and I would have to yes. As it also offers iDisk support, in addition to backups and storage; third-party apps can use this space to keep data in sync (such as OmniFocus).