Apple this week released Mobile-Me, a replacement for those of us that use .Mac. There were a lot of promises, and some have worked well, others are (supposedly) on the way.  I have been using .Mac for about a year, I subscribed in order to utilize all of the functionality provided through iLife. The use of the galleries for video, and photos worked very well. The email, while being like just about any other client, .Mac is easily configureable, and fairly intuitive. Mobile-Me’s debut start was less then auspicious, looked more like an after thought. Apple was touting Mobile-Me as “Exchange for the rest of us…”, so they may have rushed it to get it live, prior to the iPhone 2.0 launch.

Some of the functionality is finally there, by that I mean the web pages, for Email, Contacts, and Calendar. They are still a bit slow, but they should pick up is speed in the next few weeks. The integration between the iPhone 2.0 and mobile me works well. 

In my testing, the push mail, contacts, and calendar work extremely well, (once I configured the iPhone correctly.) In addition to the push features, the space for iDisk has doubled to 20 GB, and download bandwidth has been increased from 100 GB per month, to 200 GB per month. 

Now for the question of compatibility. Mobile-Me works with FireFox 2 and 3 as well as Safari 3. Internet Explorer 7 is listed as supported, however some of the web applications do not function correctly in IE 7.

The best part of this is there is no additional charge to upgrade. The same $99.00 US gets you the Mobile-Me enhancements. If you have an iPhone, or are a heavy user of iLife, I recommend at least checking out Mobile-Me for 60 days for free, and I think you will move to becoming a full time Mobile-Me subscriber. 

Update: Just as I was about to post this I received an update from Apple for the local Mobile-Me software. I will add another update if anything is a surprise.