It’s beginning we sympathize with MobileMe customers. MobileMe – the Apple’s new all-inclusive-service with email, addressbook etc. and successor of .Mac – hasn’t had performed too well in the last weeks. Even Steve Jobs said sorry and highlighted the service has started too early with too many features. MobileMe customers must have felt it is night again when they experienced problems again during the last few days.
Anyway Apple says only 1% or 2% of the MobileMe customers experiencing problems. Erm…
As said earlier: MobileMe would be a fantastic service for both MacOS X and Windows users. But since it is not working the way it should, we recommend to wait with subscriptions until chrismas. Until then problems should be solved.
MobileMe is this month’ Apple’s never ending story of issues. At first it was only minor problem: customers from Germany and France could not cancel their plans. But then too many eMails got lost and Apple needed about 10 days to fix this issue. Then silently the highly advertised Push-Feature got deactivated (see our report here). In contrast to Apple’s high quality when it comes to usability and features, MobileMe began to leave an impression like a not well tested software in beta stadium.
In the end Apple did the right thing and apologized by offering one month free of charge. All customers thought all of MobileMe’s issues are solved. But sadly they were wrong.
Now MobileMe got again issues. This time syncing of addresses and appointments with mobile devices did not and in some cases still does not work properly. But as Apple said, this problem is also solved now. In certain cases data may not be synced back to the mobile devices. In those cases customers need to activate syncing manually. Read here how to do it. Take a deep breath and be patient, re-syncing may take up to 15 minutes.
After some days of using a pwned iPhone 2G with firmware 2.0, we found some issues. As of now, we don’t know where they come from. But we definitly know: we don’t like them.
WiFi doesn’t stay connected, it falls “asleep” and takes time to reconnect
the more apps have been used, the longer it takes to see reactions
means: if you click on contacts and have used Safari, SMS and Youtube before, opening of contacts takes a lot longer than after an fresh reboot!
loading the contacts take 5-10 seconds
scrolling through contacts is jerky and freezes the view from time to time
scrolling through photos is jerky and freezes the view from time to time
launching the camera takes up to 10 seconds
the unlock slider may not react in time and you may miss a call
keyboard reacts slower than on 1.1.4
reaction time is heavily delayed (or seems not to react at all for more than 17 seconds – see video below)
We won’t blame anyone for this, because on the one hand this could be an effect of Pwning the iPhone and on the other hand these issues might be “features” of the original unmodified firmware 2.0 aswell.See update below, this is a firmware 2.0 issue.
Anyway we feel there are heavy problems with the memory management in firmware 2.0, that need to be addressed soon. Workflow was a lot faster with firmware 1.1.4.
As of now we just reboot the iPhone once a day, but this really is no working solution for such a device. We feel this reminiscent to Windows 95 times is not necessary.
Update: it has been reported this may come from Cydia. As we’re investigating this issue, we get back to you once we found a solution.
Update: Pumpkin of the iPhone Dev Team reports this most likely is an issue of the original firmware 2.0. Native iPhone users have also experienced this behaviour (see reports here in Apple’s forums). The internet is full of reports. Do a Google search you will find plenty of people reporting these issues.
For having had inconveniences (we reported here) with their new MobileMe services, Apple offers customers an additional 30 days trial period for free. Apple reps said that all issues that were occurring during transition from .Mac to MobileMe have now been solved and webservices work correctly. However they won’t use the notion “Push-Services” for now, because syncing all devices currently takes up to 15 minutes.
