So, Mobile Me…
After my first unhappy experience with iPhone syncing using MobileMe, I deactivated it and went back to manually syncing using iTunes.
Until Apple published Mobile Me Update #3, where they say:

a syncing bug was discovered which caused contact and calendar data to not sync properly over-the-air with iPhones and iPod touch. For some users this caused their contact and calendar data to disappear from their devices, but not from their computers or the MobileMe cloud. When we fixed the bug in the late afternoon the problem resolved itself for most users: their data simply reappeared on their iPhone or iPod Touch.

So, I went and try again… I reactivated the MobileMe sync for contacts, calendars and bookmarks on my iPhone, waited a bit and it all worked fine. Adding a contact on the iPhone resulted in it appearing a couple minutes later on me.com, and some more minutes later on my MacBook. Modify an event on the Mac, and after the next MobileMe sync from the Mac (15′ in automatic mode, or immediately if you trigger it manually), the changes appear on me.com and the iPhone.
Great. So I’m using it now.
Except I have two gripes.
1) Why is it that I cannot anymore select which calendars or address groups I want to sync to the iPhone? I can understand that ALL of them are synced to MobileMe, but I don’t really care having my iPhone alert me that it’s time to water the plants at home when I am on the other side of the planet. It should not be difficult to use the same setting that iTunes offer when you sync manually.
2) When you sync using MobileMe, you can’t sync manually using iTunes anymore. Say, for example, I am abroad, with no Internet access and I want to sync my iPhone with my MacBook Pro… tough luck. I need first to deactivate MobileMe syncing on the iPhone… which WIPES OUT the calendars, contacts and bookmarks on the iPhone. Don’t ask me why, this is plain stupid. Then I’ll be able to sync from scratch using iTunes. But what if I had some contacts/calendars/bookmarks I added on the iPhone, and wanted synced back to the Mac? Well, they just go away…

I wish Apple had managed to create some sort of middle solution, where you could have MobileMe over-the-air syncing coexisting with good old manual iTunes syncing. I know, it could get ugly, but iSync has been managing this for quite some time, with conflict resolution dialogues and such.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 11th, 2008 at 14:16 CEST and is filed under Apple talk, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.