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A 3G iPhone wasn't the only new offering Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) showed off during the keynote presentation at its Worldwide Developers Conference Monday. Its new online service, MobileMe, also made its debut.
Described by CEO Steve Jobs as "[Microsoft] Exchange for the rest of us," MobileMe syncs the user's push e-mail, contacts, calendar, picture gallery and data over multiple devices -- home computers, office computers, an iPhone, an iPod touch, etc. Scheduled to launch July 11, MobileMe will replace .Mac, Apple's current online service. .Mac account holders will automatically be moved to MobileMe.
Apple also announced a new Web site, me.com, which will serve as a central management portal for users.
A MobileMe user will be able to communicate using common native applications such as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Outlook or Apple iCal. Once any changes are made -- the user creates a new contact, for example, or marks a new e-mail as read -- the information will be transmitted to the "cloud," or central server, and synchronized across all devices specified in that user's MobileMe account.
Bridging the Gap
Unlike .Mac, MobileMe is a service available to both Mac and PC owners, and a single account can cover either or both Windows and Mac devices. A photo taken on an iPhone, for example, can be instantly added to the photo gallery on one's work PC as well as one's home iMac.
The service is similar to other online communication applications such as Windows Live and Google Apps. For example, with Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) applications like Gmail and Calendar, account holders log on to a common Web site from a computer or mobile 
device to use e-mail, update calendars and update photos.
Mobile Me, on the other hand, features a drag-and-drop interface and works more closely with native applications, such as the iPhone's contacts list, to automatically sync data.
Also unlike Google Apps, the ad-free Mobile Me comes with a price of US$99 per year. Google Apps is free to use and supported by advertisements. However, MobileMe's fee does allow users up to 20 GBs of online storage. Extra storage can be purchased at a rate of about $50 for each additional 20 GBs.
Expanding .Mac
MobileMe's broader applicability and functionality across both Mac and PC platforms struck Pund-IT President Charles King as particularly interesting.
"It seems to me that they're taking an interesting angle, saying Exchange is for enterprises, MobileMe is for everybody else," he told MacNewsWorld. "The subtext of that could be that it's great for consumers; there's also ways that small businesses and entrepreneurs could leverage this for remote access to shared calendars, that kind of thing."
Exchange is one of MobileMe's commercial targets, though King noted that Apple seems to be taking care not to position Exchange directly in its sights as an enterprise class solution.
"I think if you talk to Microsoft, they would have some ideas about whether Exchange was only for large companies or if it had applications for elsewhere," he said. "But I think the free services like Google Apps and Gmail are probably a clearer target."
Those services are free to use; however, they present users with targeted advertisements each time they log on. In promoting MobileMe, Apple has emphasized its service's ad-free nature.
"[Advertisements are] a common complaint that I hear from what I would term 'activists,'" King said. "But when I talk to consumers, at least in my own experience, you learn to tune that stuff out pretty easily. It can be somewhat distracting at times, but it also tends to be fairly easy to ignore."
There's no such thing as a free lunch, in other words, and users must decide whether to endure some irritation for a free service or pay up for something less intrusive.
"Consistently, Web users have opted toward irritation and free," he concluded.
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