In a letter published on Apple’s web site on Friday, Apple apologized again for the outages sparked by the transition to MobileMe services.
The letter, curiously unsigned, was written at the personal request of CEO Steve Jobs. In the letter, it outlines the problems Apple faced with MobileMe; namely the poor timing of rolling out MobileMe alongside iPhone OS 2.0 and iPod touch. The company addressed that extreme access to Apple’s servers was partly to blame, but that the MobileMe team has also corrected over 70 bugs with the online MobileMe interface since launching it.
Probably the worst news that came out of the letter, was that MobileMe members lost 10% of messages between July 16 and 18. It is not clear if this was both inbound and outbound messages.
Also unaddressed was the ongoing sync issues that users are encountering with iPhone and iPod touch users. To date, nobody on the PhoneNews.com team has successfully synchronized calendar or contact data wirelessly using the MobileMe service. Regardless of push or fetching data, regardless of PC or Mac, it just doesn’t work.
PhoneNews.com had planned a review of MobileMe, however we have a long-standing policy of giving companies reasonable time to fix issues. With the aforementioned commitment to fix MobileMe, combined with Apple testing iPhone OS 2.0.1, we will hold off on casting judgement on the first-generation of MobileMe services.
I’m sure you’ve already tried this, but just in case…
I was a .mac user already, and switched to Mobile Me automatically. I also noticed that my calendar and contact data hadn’t EVER synched until I did the following.
Open settings.
Open Mail, Contacts, Calendars
select mac.com account
You will now see a mobileMe account list with Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and bookmarks.
On my iphone, only Mail was set to ON. Turning the other three on allows them to sync wirelessly (rather than only when connected to my computer.)
Once you have turned them on, Go back to Settings, select Fetch New Data, scroll down to and select Advanced.
Now you can control the Push / Fetch settings for each mail account as well as contacts and calendars. I’m currently fetching the former and pushing the latter, which works well for me.
Cheers.
The MobileMe status article says that there was a 10% loss of emails of the affected accounts. This seems to refer to the 1% that lost service — the affected accounts. This could be read to be 10% of the emails of the 1% that lost service. That is a much smaller impact than the headline of this article would suggest.
Thomas, yes, we’ve tried turning those switches on. It hasn’t worked as of yet. Hopefully server-side improvements will fix the issue.
Art, while that is correct, there’s no way to know right now if you’re those 1% of users. Many chose .Mac (now MobileMe) because they thought it would be more reliable than free solutions, like Gmail. For many, MobileMe is business-critical email, and many fell into that 1%.
[…] that Apple is admitting that MobileMe’s launch was a failure, it’s time to go back to launch day… and see […]
When I read the post, it said 1% of users suffered a 10% loss of messages. Your post gives the impression it was all MoblieMe accounts.
Other than slightly slower access from the 16th to the 18th, I’ve had no problems with my account. I feel bad for those that have encountered trouble, and I expect better from Apple. On the other hand, I am very much enjoying the ability to sync information to my XP box too.