Today, I have decided that it would not be a good idea at all to renew my MobileMe account. I got it last year in August and after using MobileMe for about a year, I guess I just can’t see any logical reason to continue using it for my normal e-mail purposes. I am transferring all my e-mail over to my mail account over here on MediaTemple and I am just going to let my MobileMe account expire. There are quite a few reasons as to why I don’t want to use MobileMe anymore, and many of them stem from the fact that I no longer own a computer of any sort.
E-mail - The e-mail services that MobileMe has are flaky at best and non-operational at worst. The site constantly goes down and I was sincerely hoping that the transition from .mac to MobileMe would take care of many of these issues and provide a smoother, cleaner and more active interface that doesn’t freeze up as badly. It didn’t. True, the browser no longer freezes up like it used to with the old .mac webmail client, but it is just as slow, sometimes, e-mail takes forever to send and receive and many times, webmail is just generally unavailable. Couple this with the fact that the webmail application can no longer be accessed by any computer on the net (new minimum browser requirements) and you’ve got yourself one craptacular webmail service).
Cost - My GridServer webspace on MediaTemple costs me about $200 per year but it already grants me more privileges than MobileMe does. 100gb of space, 1tb of bandwidth and it’s a hosting package so it has PHP, MySQL and a lot of other cool stuff already built in. In addition to these reasons, there is also a very sturdy selection of webmail clients to login to. MobileMe, by stark contrast, is a very limited service that you can barely do much of anything with.
