Apple: MobileMe accounts extending by 60 days

Apple is trying hard to win back support after the problems that plagued the launch of MobileMe in July. Apple has said that they will extend users accounts by another 60 days for free, that is on top of the 30-day free extension.

Apple has admitted that the service needs more work, although they have said that they have made a number of improvements to MobileMe. They still have a number of things they wish to improve; they are working hard to make MobileMe a service that they can be proud of.

Apple has said “We know that MobileMe’s launch has not been our finest hour, and we truly appreciate your patience as we turn this around.”

When MobileMe was first launched in July 10 it had a number of problems, these included a number of subscribers have trouble accessing the site. Some users lost e-mails as well as having problems accessing calendars and contact information.

Source

Nice to know that Apple has owned up to their mistakes and that they are trying to solve the problem.

MobileMe issue causes Steve Jobs to rethink

MobileMe has had its fair share of problems since its launch last month, and has resulted in Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs giving MobileMe to the executive who heads iTunes, as stated in a memo sent to company employees earlier this week. We have been following this story closely, and it appears that there are still a lot of things to sort out regarding MobileMe.

Jobs himself conceded in the email, “the launch of MobileMe was not out finest hour, it was simply not up to Apple’s standards.” He also went on to say that the product ‘needed more testing and should have been rolled out in phases.’’

This email has become public news now since it was first reported by the technology site Ars Technica and then obtained by MacWorld. While Jobs stated the problems that occurred with MobileMe, he was also keen to point out that these problems won’t happen again and they predict a good future for MobileMe. “We are taking many steps to learn from the experience so that we can grow MobileMe into a service that our customers will love. One step that I can share with you today is that the MobileMe team will now report to Eddy Cue, who will lead all of our internet services—iTunes, the App Store and, starting today, MobileMe.”

So it appears that Steve Jobs has got rid of the initial panic surrounding MobileMe, and hopes that
Eddy Cue will deliver the goods under his new title of vice president of Internet Services. Cue will take over from Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of applications marketing, who was in charge of the service’s predecessor.

To read the whole article on this matter, follow the link below.

Source: Read

Steve Jobs: Mistake launching MobileMe and iPhone 3G together

Following on from Peter’s article this morning I thought I would say a little more. MobileMe from Apple has had it fair share of problems since launching and of course it is bad enough to read many readers criticisms about MobileMe but from Steve Jobs it is surely mind-blowing.

We like his honesty, Ars Technica had an internal Apple email that Steve Jobs sent out to their employees showing details of his displeasure that MobileMe was “not up to Apple’s Standards.” It indeed needs both more time in testing, and a piece-by-piece launch, rather than attempting to launch it as a “monolithic service,”

So ok Steve Jobs has said

“it was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” which is an admission that perhaps Apple had bitten off more than they could chew. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.”

That is a very good point when you think about it, they launched the Apple iPhone 3G, MobileMe then the iPhone update, and then came the App Store plus the recent 2.0.1 firmware update, we believe Apple are doing far too much to quickly and they should concentrate in giving us anything they have working properly, but it seems they want to push out as much as they can even if it works or not.

Do you think Apple is doing too much too soon?

MobileMe push email on iPhone 3G and support for IMAP-IDLE

The MobileMe issues are slowly getting fixed but just how does push email work on the Apple iPhone 3G? If you think it includes the IMAP idle method then you may be wrong.

On the Apple Discussions section of their site, someone raised just this question. While it’s believed by some that the iPhone’s email client supports IMAP-IDLE, it looks like this is incorrect.

You can read the discussion here. One user called Robin has a little expertise on this topic. He is apparently the VP Marketing of a company that wrote a whitepaper on IMAP-IDLE.

I think I should point out (as a 3G iPhone owner and as the VP Marketing of the company that wrote the whitepaper you pointed to) that the iPhone’s email client does not support IMAP-IDLE. Very disappointing given Steve Job’s initial assertion during his speech introducing the original iPhone that for email “IMAP is, of course, the best”.

We will update you on the improvements Apple makes with MobileMe. But for now, what’s your view on IMAP-IDLE and the lack of support on the iPhone?

View more news about MobileMe here.

Apple’s Steve Jobs is involved in MobileMe problem

When a company gets much larger it can sometimes lose that personal touch it had at the start. Apple has been plagued by problems with its new push data service (MobileMe) and now it’s got “company chief Steve Jobs involved”.

Some Apple users have been suffering during the 14 days since MobileMe launched and things have not got that much better.

It may be late but Apple have setup a dedicated status page that will keep MobileMe users informed of the progress on fixing the new service.

Apple is working 24-7 to improve matters, but they have reported that 1% of the accounts are affected and that “as much as 10 percent of these messages delivered between July 16th and July 18th will have been lost”. That’s a serious issue on its own, its not good losing email under any circumstances.

There will be another update this week that will provide more information on why MobileMe is having problems. We do know that the launch of iPhone 2.0 firmware and iPhone 3G had caused a massive surge of data traffic. Apple did not anticipate this load.

You can read more details on the MobileMe email support article and Apple Insider. Also view more iPhone 3G news here.

MobileMe cloud service made free by Apple

Friday might be seen as a successful day for Apple if we look at sales figures but the launch of the new iPhone 3G and MobileMe cloud service did not go without a number of problems.

Apple knows this and wants to say sorry to MobileMe users by giving the subscribers a 30-day free extension, this works out to $8.25 that users will not have to pay for.

The .Mac to MobileMe transition was no simple task and it worked out to be very problematic with unexpected performance and reliability issues that are still causing a headache for Apple.

While Apple have said that web applications seem to be running smoothly now, we are hearing that some core services are not as smooth, these include Gallery, Back to My Mac, Sync, iDisk and Mail.

Some users are complaining that a few .Mac features that were killed still need replacing and some MobileMe features can do with more capabilities.

Apple has always had a very loyal customer base thanks to the style of their products, security and good customer service; this move to give a month of MobileMe free is welcomed by all. Although it would have been nice to hear an apology on the weekend when everyone was being hit hard by the problems.

Apple MobileMe at WWDC 2008: direct replacement for .Mac

Today Apple MobileMe was announced at WWDC 2008, this will be a direct replacement for the .Mac service and after a slow start to this years conference, things started to really heat up with not only MobileMe but also the 3G iPhone left the rumor world and became fact.

MobileMe will completely sync your iPhone and PC or Mac wirelessly via Me.com, this will give you a lot more control over your gallery apps, calendar, contacts and mail. The new MobileMe will also work well with the iDisk feature so you can send stuff to friends and family using your remotely accessible hard drive.

When Apple launched the Macbook Air they knew they wanted to help you store information in other places and access it wirelessly, this is one reason they left out an optical drive in the Mac Air. Now these new services like MobileMe and other products from Apple are aiming to all work together to give the user more freedom.

Apple’s MobileMe will feature 20GB of online storage, MobileMe iDisk for online document access, MobileMe Gallery for photo sharing, Web applications at me.com, Push email, push calendar and push contacts. It will cost you $99 per year and will be available from mid July.