Apple has made the lost-phone-locating service, Find My iPhone, available for free. Has it killed the £60-per-year Mobile Me service in the process?
Apple updated the software for its mobile devices this week with iOS 4.2. At the same time, it made Find My iPhone free to anyone with an iPhone 4, iPad or a 4th generation iPod touch.
Find My iPhone is the highlight of Mobile Me. It's a feature that locates your phone should you be foolish enough to mislay it, allowing you to track down the device via GPS and, if necessary, remotely lock or wipe it.
Your erstwhile device can be tracked from any Web browser, or any Apple device with the free Find My iPhone app installed. You can also show a message on the screen, imploring anyone finding several hundred quid's worth of smart phone to do the right thing and give it back.
Now that Find My iPhone is free for owners of the latest fruit-flavoured kit, we wonder whether Apple has rendered Mobile Me obsolete.
Mobile Me syncs your email, calendar and contacts from all your Apple devices, which are then accessible via Me.com. Updates are pushed from the cloud to to your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Mac computer. You also get your own @me.com email address.
The trouble is, these services are all offered for free elsewhere. Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail are just three obvious examples of free webmail with calendar and contacts, which can be synced with your computer's mail software and pushed to your phone.
They also won't leave you tied to a Mobile Me subscription if you come to rely on your @me.com email, although you can use POP3 to migrate from Mobile Me to another service if you want to change.
Mobile Me gives access to iDisk and iGallery online storage. 20GB of online storage isn't bad, but Dropbox offers 50GB or 100GB with more flexible monthly, rather than yearly, price plans. Dropbox also offers Android and BlackBerry apps should you decide to leave Apple's steely embrace. Other services for sharing photos include Google's Picasa and Flickr.
The availability of other services offering the same or better service, for free, made Find My iPhone the killer feature of Mobile Me. Now that it's available free of charge, we reckon you should think hard before signing up for Mobile Me. Think what that £60 could buy you in the sales -- or think of it as the first chunk of money saved towards the iPhone 5.
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Comments 5
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Anonymous 23 November, 2010 12:59
Why is this not available for the 3G/3GS? Is it not technically possible or is it a part of a ploy for me to upgrade?
Rich Trenholm 23 November, 2010 13:06
I suspect it's the latter
Jason Jenkins 23 November, 2010 13:13
Lifehacker has some tips on making Find My iPhone work with older devices http://lifehacker.com/5696311/how-to-enable-and-use-find-my-iphone-for-free-on-iphone-3gs-and-other-pre+2010-devices
EvilJoe39 23 November, 2010 20:08
The cads, I wonder if this means they'll be reducing the cost of mobile.me (which to be honest i got with my mac, I don't have an iPhone) when it comes up for renewal..... i wont be holding my breath.
Anonymous 14 December, 2010 14:40
I pay for MobileMe and agree that a lot of it can be done through different services. But it does do nice things like syncing the Keychain, between my different Macs and it is also the only tool I know that will sync my bookmarks natively into Mobile Safari over-the-air.
It will even sync the items in my Dock between different Macs and applications such as Transmit can use it to sync data across your different machines. Also back to my allows me to log into my different computers remotely without installing extra software.
60 quid is a bit steep but I guess pay it because it makes my life easier by bundling all these things up without me having to worry about them. Same reason I use Macs in general I guess!