Forums | MacLife

ptervin wrote:

I like everything but the name. Wasn't there something else with a "me" that was complete trash....

that would we the infamous Windows ME (Millennium Edition), which preceded Windows XP.

-david

bratboy wrote:

Could someone explain to me what "push email" is?  How would that be different that my gmail account that I connect to through IMAP at home and the website when I'm not?

I've not used it myself, but my understanding of it is that rather than the client checking periodically to see if there is something new, the server pushes the new information to the client as soon as it appears. MobileMe also does this for calendars and contacts.

OK - I am getting this better now.  I'll never need to 'check mail'.  Lets hope the web aps rock.    For the 'me.com' name,  I guess the 'me' part they got out of that laptop deal with Maine (me.gov).  It'll be pretty good for me since I live in Maine!

bratboy wrote:

Could someone explain to me what "push email" is?  How would that be different that my gmail account that I connect to through IMAP at home and the website when I'm not?

What the others have said is correct. However, the big plus for this is that it uses much less battery power than a traditional "check every 5/10/15/30 minutes" approach that is required by POP or non-push enabled IMAP. So you get the net effect of having your email program check constantly for new mail while not wasting battery power in the process. It is a great feature and it has been one of the Blackberry's main selling points for years.

The simple fact is that push email delivers email at instant message speeds. I get email messages on my Treo (and my Blackberry when I had one) BEFORE I get them on my Mac or PC when I had one at work. In fact, I used to think it was hilarious that at my last job my email came through an exchange server and I had a rule set up to redirect messages (while still sending them to my Outlook inbox) from certain people
to my Blackberry. The messages would ALWAYS show up on my Blackberry before they showed up in Outlook. IOW, the push technology is so fast that it pushed email notifications to my phone over the cell network faster than Exchange put them in the inbox on my computer over a T1 connection.

Frank

MB38 wrote:

I don't understand what will happen to my email address.  Will it stay "@mac.com" or change to "@me.com"?  I can't change that email...

Current .mac members will be able to use both.

robco wrote:

Push email has been available for free from Yahoo! since the iPhone's launch.

I thought of that as well, but that's just email, not calendars and contacts.

Yeah, if you really need personal push calendaring and contacts, then no, Yahoo doesn't do that. You could access that (or Google) via Safari. For some folks with really active lives I can see it, but considering that folks usually charge their phones every few days or so, they'll likely be syncing them at the same time and that should be sufficient. I'm not saying it's a bad service, just a tad expensive.

I would imagine that Google is preparing similar services for Android customers.

robco wrote:

Yeah, if you really need personal push calendaring and contacts, then no, Yahoo doesn't do that. You could access that (or Google) via Safari. For some folks with really active lives I can see it, but considering that folks usually charge their phones every few days or so, they'll likely be syncing them at the same time and that should be sufficient. I'm not saying it's a bad service, just a tad expensive.

I would imagine that Google is preparing similar services for Android customers.

I can speak from experience as one of those people that has a busy life and also has the ability to sync their phone (Treo 700p) with my Mac manually. I don't like it and am looking forward to getting an iPhone big time after the announcement of MobileMe.

I can't speak for everyone but this will be MUCH more convenient for me.

It's going to completely make my cell phone bill higher.

If you are mandated to keep certain appointment and contact information truly private, you shouldn't run it through a server you don't control like MobileMe.

If you get a mobileme account and set the iPhones up with the same mobileme account they'll sync the calendars and contacts and everything. There might be a way to segment it so some sync and others don't but I wouldn't count on it.

Am I right in thinking the MobileMe sync only works with a client like Mail, not Entourage for example?