The 3G iPhone and the accompanied MobileMe service introduced in WWDC 2008 stirred the buzz in the blogosphere as ever. The MobileMe tries to solve the long-lasting synchronization problem, which Microsoft have not figured out a panacea for both enterprise market and mass customers. Apple’s answer seems like an intuitive and elegant solution in the first impression, and we may wonder, is MobileMe the ONE?

I really doubt it, based on some common sense and reasonable guess as the service is not available so far, please correct me in your comment if I am wrong.

Push model may not cross the enterprise boundary
Push mail has been very successful in the enterprise world, but why there are no such things like push document, push worksheet? The instantaneous synchronization is just purely wasted in most cases, even not that inviting in the Corp net which is powered by Gigabit ethernet, let alone the consumers are using much slower high speed internet or 3G wireless connection.

There is no silver bullet to resolve conflicts
MobileMe supports family pack, so it is possible that one file is edited in different computers. The conflict has to be resolved however fast the synchronization is. We also need to track the version number because it is hard to tell which copy is the latest without network time synchronization, so ultimately MobileMe would be a version control system. But according to my personal experience, there is no more intuitive way to resolve the conflict than three-way diff. But this is less user-friendly and not an available option if you are working with images or videos.

Accessibility and Interoperability
These are not big issues for die hard Apple fans. I believe Bonjour would automatically configure the firewall and all made-by-Apple applications would talk to MobileMe without any problem. No idea whether Apple would release the protocol document, like Microsoft did recently, to encourage 3rd party interoperability.

I personally prefer SSH, RSync and SVN( maybe Mercury later), periodically back up to my friends in a different zip code for extra safety.

I am always curious how many Muses Apple has hired in Palo Alto, why their engineers could design such a elegant desktop environment? I am totally addicted to the Mac Notebook, and would like to collect funds for a new MacBook, until I read this, summarized as:

• Crippled FreeBSD kernel
• Quasi-proprietary language — Objective C
• Lame Finder, even Apple itself admits that
• Mysterious configuration like Windows registry
• Shareware community
• Dedicated open-source

Ok, maybe the “MacBook foundation” can be used in other place…

UPDATE: the latest Mac Book seems a good tradeoff between the performance and price, still considering…

Jonathan Ive, the senior vice-president of design at Apple is the father of the state-of-the-art iMac, iPod, Powerbook etc. Here is a review from designmuseum.org.

Why iPod looks so clean and slim? One of explanations is that Jonathan was once a professional bath & toilet designer.