Apple’s announcement today of its MobileMe product is yet another validation for the cloud sync model (and another competitor for the incumbent providers).
The MobileMe offering is quite broad, as well as the expected file, contact, calendar and mail syncing, it also covers gallery and location based services (which is logical given the GPS features of the iPhone 2).
The MobileMe website is a nice offering, it has a familiar interface, much like the native individual apps would have (ie MobileMe mail looks just like a desktop mail app) – MobileMe thus bridges the current gap between the cloud based syncing offerings and application themselves.
Mobileme is priced at USD99 per annum with 20GB of storage. How the market place reacts to that pricing remains to be seen – 20GB is pretty light for a service that encourages photo sharing – but extra 20GB storage chunks are available at USD49.
Check out the introductory video here.
