Thomas Silkjær | Graphic design & photography

I have: iPhone, Mac Mini, iMac, Macbook Pro.
Wife has: Samsung SGH-U700, Macbook.

My very first impression and thought about MobileMe was, that it was a smart idea to have all computers synchronized, so we had to buy a Family Pack. My assumption was that with a Family Pack we would be able to have each our calendars, mails and address books, but that we would be able to share address book groups with each other, and have common calendars.

I was wrong. We would be able to have each our calendars, subscribe to each others calendars in iCal, but never be able to have a common calendar. Another issue would be that the subscribed calendars wouldn't be pushed to my iPhone.

Choosing a single account over a Family Pack

Instead, I signed up for a MobileMe single account trial, to share between me and my wife. I have tried to make a list of pro's and con's of using a single MobileMe account, over a Family Pack:

Pro's

• Can have each our calendars, that all can be pushed.
• Can have shared calendars, both can read/write.
• Can share iDisk.

Con's

• Only one e-mail address.
• Not being able to have each our contacts in the address book (We can have each our contact groups though, of course).
• Can't have private calendars/hide girlfriend/boyfriend dates from each other.

Mobile phones

Using the iPhone, I get all new data pushed to the phone, and all new data from the phone gets pushed to the MobileMe account, and synchronized to the other macs. This have worked flawless as of now. It is nice, not having to synchronize the phone every day through cable, but that everything happens on the fly. Also my wife can see dates in her iCal as soon as i have written them on the iPhone - awesome!

My wife, on the other hand, doesn't have an iPhone, but a Samsung SGH-U700. iSync doesn't support that phone, unfortunately, but by using e.g. nova media iSync plugins, that can be fixed. Now the only thing she needs to do, to have everything updated on her phone, is synchronizing daily with her mac, that is up-to-date through MobileMe. Her dates on the Samsung calendar, will also be synced to her mac, and then to MobileMe, updating my iPhone and my macs.

Mail

Mail works as a normal IMAP account - nothing new there. As of now, no SPAM has gone through the filter, so I can't complain about that either. My only current issue is regarding the iPhone.

My setup is, that i forward e-mails from all my previous e-mail accounts to my new @me.com e-mail address. I would like to be able to reply with the right "from"-address, instead of always from the new @me.com-address. In Mail.app on OS X you can comma separate e-mail addresses in the account preferences, to be able to choose from which e-mail you wish to send. You can that on the iPhone too, if you manually set up an e-mail account, but not when you auto-setup the MobileMe account.

The issue with manually setting up the MobileMe account, is that you can't use PUSH, and will have to set a time interval for the phone to check for new mails - in other words, ignoring the smart PUSH feature that MobileMe actually is.

I also miss the possibility to have multiple "from"-addresses on the MobileMe webmail interface.

Conclusion

I really like the setup, the con's of using a shared MobileMe account doesn't bother us - as far as I know we don't have any dates to hide from each others, and my wife can check her mail as usual using IMAP elsewhere. Addresses is just nice for us to have synchronized, because it is a huge job to maintain two address books where most people are the same anyways.

The next steps for MobileMe, could be:

• improving the Family Pack to be able to share calendars, have common calendars, address books etc.
• allowing synchronization of calendar subscriptions - so subscriptions could be pushed to the phones as well.
• allowing multiple "from"-addresses in webmail interface and on iPhone.