Apple’s MobileMe launch has been ill-starred since the beginning, now the company has taken a thwack from veteran technology correspondent, Walt Mossberg, of the Wall Street Journal.
In his latest review of the online service, he declares it to be too flawed to be reliable. He even says that Apple should have delayed launch of the service until it had ironed out its many glitches.
“After a week of intense testing of [Apple’s MobileMe] service, I can’t recommend it, at least not in its current state. It’s a great idea, but, as of now, MobileMe has too many flaws to keep its promises,” Mossberg wrote.
“I am not referring to the launch glitches that plagued MobileMe earlier this month, such as servers that couldn’t keep up with the traffic and email outages that, for some users, persist as I write this. Those were bad, but they have eased considerably. Apple already has apologized for them and is giving customers an extra 30 days on their subscriptions to make up for the poor start. The problems I am citing are systemic,” Mossberg reports.
“In my tests, using two Macs, two Dell computers and two iPhones, I ran into problem after problem. One big issue is that while changes made on the Web site or the iPhone are instantly pushed to the computers, changes made on computers are only synced every 15 minutes, at best. Apple has admitted that this is a problem, and says it is working on it,” Mossberg reports.
“If Apple does get MobileMe working smoothly, it could be a terrific service. But it’s way too ragged now,” Mossberg reports.