Same data, different devices

Synchronising may become easier with Apple’s Mobile Me service

The iPhone is coming to India. I know this is not hot news. The real excitement is the reason why you should buy the iPhone when it’s here in India. And no, the reason is not the cool touch features of the phone or its pictures, videos, audio. The truth is, the iPhone will be a smart business phone.

The bane of technology is that we are saddled with multiple devices. I have a home computer, a laptop, a Blackberry and a few other devices I use to access the Internet and or do my work (some shared computers, some hand-held consoles). Upwardly mobile people have at least a cell phone, a home computer/laptop and an official laptop/PC, and keeping information, documents, contacts, email all synchronised among these devices is a bit of a bother. I wrote in this column recently on how to access your PC remotely, but if the problem for you is synchronising your files, Apple has just announced a new service called Mobile Me (www.me.com).

The service rides on the inability of an individual user to access Microsoft Exchange for email. Also your office might not provide you with a Microsoft Exchange account. These would make ensuring the same contact information in your phone and your multiple PCs a difficult thing. With Mobile Me, possibly powered by Google, you will be able to manage this mess. Apple will provide you with a 20GB file storage online, a synchronised email, calendar and address book, and a capability to share your files, data, and music across PCs. How this works relies on an acronym called Push.

Say you update a contact on your iPhone (right now, the service is available only on the Apple phone), and you add a picture and the birth date of a contact. Immediately, this update is ‘pushed’ to Apple’s server, from where your PC (Windows) or Apple Mac pulls the information when it is put on. Similarly, if you access your email on your Apple or PC at home and move it to a different folder, or add an entry in the calendar for an appointment with your customer. When you reach office, you will see the same entry and your emails filed properly on your office machine.

You can, of course, say you can do this with other online services too. But what makes Mobile Me interesting is that this will work with Apple Mail Client, Outlook and some other clients, so there will be no need to open a web page and looking through folders, files, calendars to find where you stored the information.

To know more, head to www.me.com, and see the video. Ladies and gentleman, Apple has done it again.

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The Above article was printed in the Indian Express, on Sunday June 22, 2008