Every little helps
After a shakey launch and initial few months, MobileMe has once again become an attractive proposition not just for iPhone users but for Mac users and even PC users. But its price point of $140 per year is pretty steep, and places it out-of-reach for many would-be users including myself. So what are the alternatives? In this article I will show you how to get the MobileMe experience using free alternatives.
Service: Push Mail
Free solution: Yahoo! Mail
Yes, Yahoo! Mail. While you could argue that the web client for Yahoo! is leagues behind the likes of GMail, Yahoo! has one distinct advantage where the iPhone is concerned, and that is that it supports push mail. You can go ahead and sign up for a free Yahoo! account right now, add it to your iPhone mail app and you will instantly have push mail right there on your phone, or otherwise if you are a Telecom / Xtra customer, you can user your existing @xtra address using Yahoo! push. All you need to do is choose ‘Yahoo!’ when you add the account to your iPhone and enter your Xtra email address as your Yahoo! ID.
Service: Over-the-air Calender Sync
Free solution: Google Calendar
Google Calendar has a great web GUI that is quick and easy to use, and you can easily sync it with your iPhone. To setup an account, head over to www.google.com/calendar. Once done, to add it to your iPhone go to Settings –> Mail, Contacts, Calendars –> Add Account –> Other –> Add CalDAV Account. For the server, enter www.google.com. For your user name and password, enter your Google login details. You now have two-way over-the-air calendar syncing.
Service: Over-the-air Contacts Sync
Free solution: Google Contacts
Google contacts can be synced over-the-air with iPhone as a Microsoft Exchange account. All you need to do is setup a GMail account, then follow the guide on this page to setup syncing. You don’t need to actually use your new GMail account for email – you can switch the mail component ‘off’ on your iPhone after the account details have been entered. You can also use this method to sync your Google Calendar if you prefer, rather than the method I explained above.
Service: Online Photos Gallery
Free solution: Flickr
Flickr really needs no introduction, but for the uninitiated, it is arguably the best place to store your photos online. Owned by Yahoo! (but don’t hold that against it), this is a great service that again lends itself to the iPhone very well. The website itself has a great iPhone version which you will automatically see when you login from Mobile Safari, and there are a miriad of apps on the app store than can view and upload photos to it thanks to its open APIs. Flickr Sendr is a great free app for uploading photos to your account from your camera roll, or Mobile Fotos is a great kiwi-developed app if you fancy splashing out $4.29. There are lots more and you really can’t go wrong.
Service: iDisk (Online Storage and Sync)
Free solution: Dropbox
Dropbox is a relative new-kid-on-the-block but already it is making big waves in all corners of the net. Working across PC, Mac and online, Dropbox is an online storage service similar in execution to iDisk. Install the desktop client on your computer and any files or folders you store within the ‘My Dropbox’ folder on your PC will be synced back to the Dropbox server. Install the client on another computer, and any file or folder saved on one will be ‘pushed’ to the other so that a local copy is always available. Dropbox has an iPhone UI for mobile safari and a native app is currently pending approval from Apple. A free subscription will give you 2GB of storage, though you can opt to pay for more. The big advantage that Dropbox has over iDisk is the ability to reverse your actions for upto 30 days. For example, if you delete a file and then decide that perhaps you shouldn’t have, you can undelete it. Or if you edit a word document but a few days later you want the original back, you can recover it.
Service: Find my iPhone device location
Free solution: GadgetTrak
Find my iPhone is perhaps one of the most compelling reasons to shell out $140 for MobileMe, but there is an alternative solution. GadgetTrak is a free app which installs an icon with a similar appearance to Safari, and the idea is that the thief will (hopefully) open the app thinking it is a web browser. Once open, the app will act like a web browser, however all the while it is sending the GPS co-ordinates of your device to the GadgetTrak website. Log in and you’ll see the whereabouts of your iPhone on a Google Map.
No doubt there are numerous other alternatives to any and all of the pieces of MobileMe, let us know of any others you can recommend in the comments!
Cool article Steve,
I myself use Mme for the convenience.
Having a macbook its so “Inclusive” shall we say.
Agree with the price though. I think I paid a wee bit less however !!
(psychrn has made 131 comments)
Thanks for the tip on adding Google Calender via Add CalDAV Account settings!
And I'll be looking into GadgetTrak too.
(ryan_ has made 3 comments)
Uh I think I rather pay for MobileMe service for Finding My iPhone and I can't rely on GadgetTrak because you need your phone unlock to let the thief use it, since I'm porting a lot of private data onto the iPhone might as well use a proper find my iPhone service.
Also I think my iPhone is actually quiet sucking up data but I rather let it suck some data rather than be sorry at the end of the day.
(MX28080 has made 29 comments)