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- MobileMe: Is it worth it?
If you believe the marketing hype, you aren’t really a true Mac user unless you have MobileMe. MobileMe is pushed heavily in the Mac and iPhone UI as well as the Apple retail environment. Fancy terms like "beyond the box sales" are a clever way of saying “high profit” for Apple.
Let’s break down the features of MobileMe see if it’s worth it. The retail price of MobileMe is $99, though discounts abound, but for this article, let’s stick with the $99 price. My calculator app says this comes to $8.25 a month, or a little more than a quarter a day. Pretty cheap, but can you cut it out and save some money? What if Apple sold the features a la carte, like we wish our cable companies would do with channels? With a bit of research, here are what I think are the market rates for each of these features (or at least what I would pay for them).
Ring my iPhone/Display a message (Free)
The ability to force your phone to ring, even when it’s in vibrate mode is nice. However, we all got along OK before that feature was implemented. It’s nice, but I wouldn’t pay for it.
Remote Lock and Remote Wipe ($4.99 per month)
We all know Liz Lemon’s ordeal with her iPhone. While I don’t have adult photos on my iPhone, I do have information I’d rather not fall into the wrong hands. Being able to remotely lock and then possibly wipe my iPhone is really of great value to me. It’s peace of mind insurance and I’ll price it like AT&T’s insurance for other phones. Those who are not as concerned with having their phone fall into others' hands may not value this as much as I do.
Find my Phone on the Map ($5.00 or combine with Remote Lock/Wipe for $7.50)
AT&T has a GPS service for other phones called “AT&T Family Map” and charges $9.99 to track up to two people. Since this is for just one phone, I divided the cost in half. Being able to find your phone when you lose it is awesome. I value this feature the same as the Remote Lock and Wipe: peace of mind if the phone gets lost. One without the other would be helpful and have pretty much the same value. Combine the two and I expect a bit of a discount.
iDisk (Free for 2 GB, .25 for each additional GB)
Yawn. 20 GB of storage in the cloud. Who doesn’t store data in the cloud these days? Standard pricing seems to be to give two GB away for free and charge about 25 cents for each additional GB (See DropBox or SugarSync). Given the fact that the iDisk tends to be rather slow, I'm not sure I’d want to pay much at all. The “seamless” desktop synchronization of the iDisk can’t match the true automatic synchronization of DropBox and SugarSync
Back To My Mac (Free)
Being able to remotely get files off your Mac? There’s an app for that and it was first developed in late 1980s and was named Timbuktu. In addition to Timbuktu (which still exists), these days there are free products such as LogMeIn Free and VNC (See my review of iPhone remote apps). Additionally, Back To My Mac isn’t 100% reliable, and if you can better rely on other free products, then how much is it really worth?
MobileMe Gallery (Free)
Online photo gallery? Who doesn’t have one these days? Flickr and Facebook fit the bill nicely and if you don’t like those social networking sites pretty much anyone who develops film today will give you a free online gallery, with occasional minor restrictions.
Me.com Email (Free)
Would anyone actually pay for web-based email? Really? With offerings from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, someone has to be really out of the loop to be paying for web based email. Granted, Me.com makes it pretty and easy, but it’s more a matter of personal preference than any true value. Sending large files and sharing them are easy, but countless services exist to help with just that. The average user rarely needs to send a large file that one of these services doesn’t support.
iWeb Publishing (Free)
For those of us who use iWeb, MobileMe makes publishing delightfully simple. You can publish to other sites with a bit of a workaround, and those workarounds are easy to find on the web, so paying for this feature is for people who don’t know how to Google.
Over the Air Syncing ($2.00)
The value of this is based on Verizon’s Backup Assistant program that will back up your contacts for almost any Verizon phone. When we look at the T-Mobile Sidekick it’s included with the service. For syncing files between computers, see Dropbox and SugarSync. Contacts and calendars can be synced using Google as a conduit (See BusySync). Having your keychains and widgets synced is nice, but workarounds with other syncing software allow you to do that as well.
Personally, this is the killer feature of MobileMe for me. I work with a large number of clients and all my contacts and appointments are on my iPhone. Before I can get to a desktop to sync, I’ll often have made a few appointments and might accidentally double book myself if I didn’t have this feature. Sure, I could use Google to do it exclusively but that’s a few extra steps and time is often of the essence for me.
All of it working together as one package (Free or Priceless)
Seamless integration is nice, don’t get me wrong. Would I be willing to pay for it? Not really. I’d rather save money buying the features I need and make them work together myself, manually. For some people, the very reason they bought an iPhone instead of another mobile device is due to the ease of use factor, so for these folks, the more everything works together without thinking about it, the better.
So what’s my personal decision? When I add the Remote wipe/lock/find/ring feature ($7.50) with the Over the Air Syncing ($2.00), MobileMe justifies itself. Other features really aren’t worth paying for. So again, how much would you pay and what features are most valuable for you? Operators are standing by.
Переслать - iPhone and iPod Touch See International Surge
AdMob, the mobile advertising network, has released its latest metrics report (PDF), which looks at trends for the year. In 2009, one of those would be 150 percent growth for iPhone OS devices on AdMob’s network, with the greatest growth for the iPhone and iPod touch outside the U.S. While this is great news for the platform, it’s not quite the world domination the pretty charts suggest.
According to AdMob, there were 25.3 million unique iPhone OS users in their network in November, a unique user being one that has seen at least one ad request in a given month. That represents less than half the 60 million or so iPhone OS devices that have been sold, but it’s still a valid sample measuring change, change that favors Apple, at least for now.
As previously reported, the iPhone in Japan has come to represent nearly half the smartphone market, so that’s in keeping with what AdMob reports in Japan this year. France saw a big jump too, which could be a result of the end of carrier exclusivity. While China is also up, the lackluster official launch of the iPhone, only 5,000 units sold, likely has little to do with that growth. Gray-market, often pre-owned iPhones will continue to dominate iPhone sales in China into 2010, but that’s not biggest problem for Apple; that would be continued growth in the U.S.
Not that 100 percent growth is bad, but in the U.S. iPhone OS devices have likely reached a saturation point, at least compared to other countries. For those pining for a Verizon iPhone, this relative slowing of growth should be a strong incentive for Apple to abandon its exclusivity agreement with AT&T. Another incentive would be competition from Android.
AdMob shows Android traffic up dramatically over the year. For November, Android accounted for 27 percent of ad requests, up from 20 percent in October, with 88 percent of traffic generated in the US. Expect that to change in 2010 with a profusion of Android devices and deals being made domestically and internationally. While 2009 may have been the year of iPhone OS, unless Apple abandons carrier exclusivity 2010 may belong to Google.
Переслать - VLC for Mac Resting on Shaky Ground
The very capable, and conversion-headache-preventing (HUH?), open-source VLC player is one of the very first things I install on any new Mac, after Firefox. If you’re playing anything that isn’t a straightforward .AVI file, and especially if you want to play the notoriously tricky .MKV format, VideoLAN’s multiplatform player is an absolute necessity. Sadly, it might not be around for much longer.
VLC’s OS X incarnation is in danger, according to VideoLAN, due to a lack of developers working on the project. Right now, the total number of active devs on the OS X port of the software is exactly zero, which is threatening official support of the software beyond version 1.1.0. VLC’s current version on the Mac is 1.0.3.
The dearth of willing developers has already led to the 64-bit version of VLC being put on hold, which is really unfortunate because thanks to Snow Leopard’s improvements, such an upgrade would improve the overall performance of the media player by a fair margin. All hope is not lost, though. VideoLAN is looking for qualified volunteers to help keep VLC for Mac alive. Anyone with knowledge of C, Cocoa and Xcode who’s inclined to help out should check out VideoLAN’s official wiki to see how to get involved.
The VideoLAN Foundation mentioned that “Apple doesn’t want [them] on the Mac platform and is blocking us a lot, and refuses to explain why,” according to PC World. At least part of that stonewalling involves the Mac maker’s refusal to list the player on the software downloads section of its official web site. It probably makes it much harder to garner support from the community without the Apple bump.
I, for one, will be very sad if VLC’s Mac support ceases, but unfortunately I am not a developer. If you are, and you have time, consider lending a hand.
Переслать
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