Update to Mobile Me Still NOT Fixed

I posted a little while ago about Mobile Me still not being fixed and I provide you an update here:

Mobile Me is Still not fixed.

Mobile Me made it's debut on July 9th, 2008. Here we are, approaching the 2 month threshold and I am still getting email messages hours after they were sent. Granted, this is an improvement over the days delayed emails I was experiencing (see previous post), but it's far from a reliable service.

The phone also seems to be inconsistent with it's "push" features. Sometimes mail is delivered instantly, but other times the iPhone seems to forget about my MobileMe account leaving it up to me to manually fetch new messages.

With just about everything linked to your email address, it's concerning to think that messages won't be delivered. Until Apple hammers out this service (and I think they will . . . it might take giving away a free year to current customers) I've transferred over important email notifications to my gmail service.

Perhaps it's perception, but gmail seems to have a greater uptime and reliability than the new MobileMe service. To further research I went out looking for the gmail and MobileMe SLA's (Service Level Agreements). Google makes it clear that for a free service they're not going to lock into any SLA. For their pay service at $50 / user / year you get a 99.9% up time guarantee. Apple's $99 / year service comes with no SLA, so Apple really isn't obligated to a particular uptime. That being said I think it's great that Apple posts it's service issues for all to see, Google could take some notes here.

I'm certain that Apple will clean up the service, but for now you might want to use a different email address . . . it has me feeling more confident even if I'm not truly getting better uptime.

MobileMe Still NOT Fixed

Apple's new MobileMe service (sorry for the image, just seems more fitting than the pretty logo Apple has supplied) has had it's issues; so much so that Apple big dog Steve Jobs has openly admitted the service launched too early and could have been postponed until a later date. MobileMe leadership has changed recently into the hands of Eddie Cue, the Vice President of iTunes.

If you take a look at the MobileMe System Status History you will see that the last REPORTED outage was on 8/11, and was restored on 8/11. Interestingly enough I experienced an issue on 8/12 and it wasn't resolved until today, 8/15 when I received an email that was sent on 8/12.

I'm pretty sure that I could have received the same message through the US Postal Service earlier. For all you MobileMe users, you might want to pick up a book of stamps...