So, mobileme…
I really wanted to like it… the idea is good, it looks nice… but it seems to be .Mac all over again.
I don’t care about the issue of the “push” not being real push and taking 15′ to propagate from my Mac to the “cloud”.
My problem is the sync with my iPhone. I subscribed to mobileme, then configured the account on my iPhone, activated all the push features, did a first sync through iTunes and everything went fine.
OK, maybe the propagation is not as instantaneous as I’d like it to be, but the over-the-air sync is great. Or would be great if it worked really reliably. Let’s say that it works, but that when you test it at your desk, the time it takes for data to propagate is too long. But in real life, like adding an appointment on the road, it’s fine, when I come back home the appointment has been pushed to my MacBook Pro’s iCal.

BUT… I noticed an annoying thing: if you activate the mobileme syncing of calendars, in iTunes you have no option anymore to select which calendars you want synced to your iPhone. I don’t want all my calendars on my iPhone, I have a whole bunch of them that I especially don’t want beeping when I’m away from my desk, like backup reminders and such.

So I decided to deactivate mobileme calendar syncing on the iPhone. But when you do that, it ERASES the calendars from the iPhone, and you’re left with nothing until you synchronise it back through iTunes… in theory.
Because when I connected the iPhone to iTunes, it still said that my calendars where automatically synced over the air through mobileme. Damn. I forced a sync, but nada, nothing, still empty calendars on my iPhone.
I tried everything, including resetting the SyncServices folder as recommended by Apple.
Nothing, iTunes still tells me my calendars are handled by mobileme.

So in the end I restored my iPhone to its original state.

What a mobilemess…

[UPDATE: while trying to figure out this mess, I tracked the console messages during the iPhone's restore process and found this hidden gem of Apple-dev Star Wars humor:

25/07/08 00:15:32 [0x0-0x24024].com.apple.iTunes[269] MobileDevice: AMDeviceConnect: This is not the droid you’re looking for. Move along, move along.

At least, it made me laugh at 00:21 while I’m waiting for the restore to complete… I need the phone ready by tomorrow morning, dammit!]

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 22:24 CEST and is filed under Apple talk, Rants & Raves, 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.