Impressions: MobileMe and iPod Touch

With MobileMe, you can have emails, calendars, contacts, and bookmarks pushed to your iPhone / iPod Touch. In other words, you can wirelessly sync the information on your iPhone or Touch.

Basically it works as promised, and delivers just what I wanted. I no longer need to connect my Touch everyday to get my calendars synced.

Trouble with setting it up
However, I did have some trouble to getting it to work initially. With my iPhone 2.0 Software installed on my Touch, I went on to set up MobileMe on my Touch. I turned on my email, and it was working. I proceeded to turn on my bookmarks and calendars, but none of them were syncing. I restored my iPod Touch. This time I wanted to see if calendars worked, so I turned on email and calendars for syncing. The calendars were working, but when I proceeded to turning on my contacts, I couldn’t turn it on! So I did another restore. This time, I decided I was just going to turn all the items on all at once for syncing. And yes! Everything was working.

Quite a frustrating experience. It reminds me of when I was trying to get Back to My Mac working.

Impressions

• Email – Previously, I configured my Touch to fetch for email every 15 minutes. If I had new email, I would know every 15-minute interval. Having push email doesn’t really change things that much to me. 
  
  
• Calendars – Not only do my calendars stay in sync now, I realized that there were multiple calendar support. I got excited when I found out, but then I realized – where is my birthday calendar? Wait, where’s my US holidays calendar? It seems that calendars that you subscribed to are not pushed to the Touch. If you sync with a cable, you can sync all the subscribed calendars. If you want to sync wirelessly, you have to give up your subscribed calendars. That’s the tradeoff. Let’s hope Apple get this fixed soon.
  
  
• Bookmarks – Works like promised. Since there are certain bookmarks for the iPod Touch like the Zinio iPhone Newsreader, I added an iPod folder specific for sites for my Touch.
  
  
• Contacts – Contacts synchronization is the least useful of all to me. This is because most of my contacts get entered through my cellphone. It’s troublesome to try to get the contacts off the phone, onto the computer, and finally to the Touch. However, I could definitely imagine how this would be a killer app for me if I had the iPhone. 
  

Send to MobileMe Gallery - not so useful
In addition, you can also send photos to your MobileMe Gallery. Since the Touch doesn’t have a camera, you can’t capture any photos to send to MobileMe. In most cases, all the photos you could send would already be in your iPhoto library on your Mac. If you were to place some photos on the MobileMe Gallery, you’d probably have done so in iPhoto. However, I guess it’s possible that you may want to decide which photos you would like send to MobileMe when you’re away from the computer.

I should note that there are two possible ways you can get photos that are not on your Touch.

1. Take a screenshot (click here for my post on how)
   
   
2. Receive an image not in your iPhoto library via email, and then save it. This will work great if you get a picture from your friend. I probably wouldn’t email a new picture to myself and then send it to MobileMe since I can configure an email address that would send an picture straight to MobileMe Gallery. 

The Touch is one of the best PDAs out there, and when complemented with MobileMe, it's even better.  For iPod Touch owners, if you don't have access to Microsoft Exchange and you do a lot of scheduling, MobileMe is definitely something to consider.  It's really nice to know that when you leave your house, calendars on your Touch are up-to-date.