Exchange is not, has not been for years, the sole preserve of business users. Just do a google search for "Free Exchange Mail Activesync" - there are plenty of them.

Personally, I pay $10/month for a 200MB mailbox with postini email filtering. I then set up my home PC and my Windows Mobile phone to use this email account and viola! Over-The-Air synched emails, contacts, appointments - the lot.

I don't even need to "set it up" on my mobile - just configure outlook to use it (I got free outlook 2007 with the exchange acct) then plug the phone into the PC and it *automatically* configures the phone.

And before you go saying "But they provide 20GB" - haha yeah, fat lot of use that will be. You ever tried synching 20GB over even a 3G connection?? Use "the cloud" to host the data (Contacts, mail etc) and USB or WiFi to put the videos and music and such on your phone when at home.

Jeez, talk about reinventing the wheel.

Both mobile me and live mesh are entirely upside down in concept. It is utterly wrong to convince people that it's normal to hand over every piece of personal data they own to a third party. The technology isn't ready for mass market yet so they're cobbling together a solution where they own the keys to your house.

Effort should be put into turning these types of services into devices to live in home networks (much like a wireless router) that acts as a kind of personal file server and authentication device.

It's upsetting that people will give away their privacy so readily. Great ideal, horrid implementation. It's just a shame the iPhone will cause widespread update of the service.

Why is a me.com address embarrassing? Am I missing something here? And why is it worse to advertise Apple than it is to advertise Google or Microsoft?

Paris because perhaps I'm being dumber than she is.

I agree completely with your analysis, and in short order I will be holding an iPhone 3g... all to have consistant thick client (Outlook), Thin client (Web) and mobile client sync of my contacts, email and calendar.

I blogged about this before: http://whataloadofblog.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!46577623CF86C9E1!227.entry

I have been a paid subscriber to Windows Live mail, but you don't get calendar syncing unless you are a MSN subscriber in the US. Confusing andmisleading. An exchange is too expensive for just me on my own.

I also use Google Apps, which have many commendable features, but again are effectively web only and can be disjointed.

Angelic Steve Jobs - trust him to actually know what I want... for the moment.

Jonathan

www.jonathanbourke.ie

But you still have the choice of a .mac address with the new service, all you had to do was ask in any Apple shop, that's what I did because you cannot buy Mobileme yet, but you can still buy .Mac packs in the shops which will upgrade to mobileme.

Hosted exchange is cheap, you can often use your own domain name (like I do, no icky .mac for .me ) and it integrates perfectly with all my windows mobile phones and all my laptops, all syching to the same account. Hostway, my hosted exchange provider, also provides Outlook web access, so I can also access my PIM information that way, and of course I can initiate a remote wipe if I wanted to.

The only thing missing has been file sync, and Live Mesh should fill that role excellently.

I searched for some way to keep a number of computers in sync for years but could never face the effort of setting up and maintaining my own mail server.

However, since the tail end of last year Googlemail has supported IMAP.

I've been using it for multiple accounts and it works perfectly and allows use of your own domain (although if you use Google's outgoing mailserver to keep your sent items in sync your mails do appear as 'yourname@Gmail.com on behalf of yourname@yourdomain').

Addressbook and calendar sync i've not yet solved but I'm not prepared to sign up for $100 p.a. and have to change my email address for the limited unique functionality that mac.com provides.

...a bit clunky, no?