July 2008 - OurView: The Opinion Blog

After our original post on MobileMe we came in for some criticism for our rather pro-Apple attitude. Our initial thoughts were that Apple had shown a compelling set of products, that showed some nice design touches and boasted strong integration with their hardware, in particular the iPhone.

Well today the MobileMe service is finally stable enough for us to have a play with, so we took another look at Apple’s offerings.  The problems that Apple have had over the last few days with the launch of MobileMe has shown that its not easy building a software + services offering, no matter how big a company you are. In that sense it makes what Microsoft is attempting to achieve with Live Mesh even more impressive, with not just the consumer offering but the entire platform scenario as well.

Signup

The first thing you’ll notice when visiting me.com using Internet Explorer is the Anti-IE7 popup. In fact you can’t help but notice it as it takes over the entire screen, and to continue you must confess to your stupidity in using a Microsoft product. I wonder what they do to Zune users…

MobileMe is not a free product, it comes in at $99 or just under £50 . While there is an initial trial period of 60 days, you’ll still need to provide a credit card on signup in order to give it a try, though there is no billing until after the trial. Overall registration is pretty painless, except for Apple insisting that you give them a phone number.

Upon logging into MobileMe for the first time, users are greeted with a first run video. Unsurprisingly it uses Quicktime, which as I don’t have installed, I therefore can’t comment on the content delivered.

Mail & Contacts

The mail service itself is fairly standard, images in incoming HTML emails are blocked until  allowed and there are vacation reply, email forwarding and POP3 checking options built in. There’s no rich text editor for emails, nor is spell checking performed as you type in IE7, therefore remember to hit the spell check button before sending.

Email attachments are limited to 20MB, however Apple have decided to grey out the screen during this upload and prevent the user from doing anything else. This is the only place in MobileMe where Apple adopts this particular approach, but be warned that on a slow upload you could be stuck doing nothing for a while.

The inbox has a few nice touches. You can preview the first few words of the email and there is a Quick Reply button to save loading up the full email editor. Alas this feature wasn’t working 100% when I tried it.

I don’t really have much to say for contacts, except that compared to Windows Live, the ability to add a photo to a contact was nice. Note to Apple, please set the default date system to match with the billing currency, there’s nothing worse than entering a birthday and then missing it due to Americanisation. Also if you don’t enter a year, it defaults to 2008. Minor points, but irritating nevertheless.

Calendar

The key strength here is the synchronisation between MobileMe and the iPhone/iPod Touch, giving non-Exchange users a way of backing up to the cloud. The web calendar including a to-do list down the side of the screen, however there’s no iCal subscription support. Users can enable a special Birthdays calendar for their contacts, which for those who aren’t using a social networking site is a nice addition.

Gallery

Functionality is basic but the front-end for public viewing is gorgeous due to the small touches, for example the reflection applied below each of the photos. Check out my demo album to see for yourself.

Options include allowing the public uploading of photos, the downloading of the entire album in a zip file and the adding of photos via email or iPhone. These choices can be made on a per album basis, meaning that privacy can be maintained where appropriate.

While the front-end UI is nice, its difficult to see the current web generation migrating from Facebook/My Space due to the loss of automatic public notifications. Facebook Application anybody?

iDisk

Offering 20GB of online storage, iDisk is Apple’s equivalent of Windows Live Skydrive and Foldershare. Users can upload files through the browser, or alternatively install iTunes and map the drive onto the PC or Mac. With iTunes now being Apple’s main route onto the PC, its no surprise to see the MobileMe aspects being bundled in with the media player, but that brings its own set of problems.

Files can be shared publicly if desired, or kept private as a backup of your device(s). For those who want to backup large files and who aren’t using Live Mesh, the maximum file size is 1GB, compared to Skydrive’s existing 50MB limit. Again Apple try to excel with the small touches, and have built a compress option into the website.

Conclusion

Overall, MobileMe looks nice though lacks functionality in some areas. My impressions were that it was more along the lines of a v1 product, which given Apple has been running .Mac for years seems somewhat surprising. The strong integration with iPhone and iPod Touch will definitely help convert some users, however I can’t see people switching email providers from Hotmail, Yahoo or Gmail. The same is true for converting from Facebook or Flickr for image hosting. The cross-Apple scenarios will probably fare well, in particular contacts and calendar. As for iDisk, unless you need the backup functionality for your Mac, you’re probably better off sticking with Windows Live Skydrive and then moving to Live Mesh if you haven’t done so already.

Overall the page rendering had a slight lag, which given the low usage (<5 contacts, <5 email in the inbox etc) is worrying for the heavy users. Performance with Firefox was considerably better than Internet Explorer, This may just be down to Apple getting the service going after its shaky start, only time will tell.

Given the free alternatives available its not worth considering at $99 if you aren’t an iPhone/iPod Touch user. If you are though, definitely give it a try.

With today being the iPhone 2.0 launch, there’s a lot of chat about the new Applications Store and Apple touting the 500 third party applications available initially. Ina Fried already questioned Microsoft about how this compares to Windows Mobile, with the response being that “Microsoft has nearly 18,000” applications” and the implication that this is just the Apple Reality Distortion Field at work. I’m not convinced however.

For starters Apple has a much improved experience, from finding the applications, paying and then through to downloading and installation. Apple offers one main store that is integrated into the devices themselves, with payment made easy via the regular iTunes account. Compare this to Windows Mobile users who typically have to find the programs via a search engine, see if it meets their requirements and and then pay the developer direct.

In addition, a large number of the applications offered now in the Apple store are “official” and by that I mean the developers of the service are the ones who made the iPhone app. Comparing to Windows Mobile, this isn’t always the case. Facebook, MySpace or Ebay developed applications? No such luck. Even Blackberry devices have native applications support from some of these services, which begs the question why is Windows Mobile is being omitted. (Aside, where is the Zune Windows Mobile application for controlling your PC playlist or Media Center application?) Windows Mobile 7 has a lot of catching up to do with the iPhone, and not just in the UI, browsing and attractive hardware arena that are the most obvious improvements Apple has pushed.

Ina also picked up that Microsoft are offering no iPhone applications for their products, and in her interview they downplayed any knowledge of these being in development. Given Activesync has already been licensed, I’d be surprised to see no official applications coming out this year. The Live Search Windows Mobile application is extremely good, why not give the benefits to iPhone users too? After all, Ray Ozzie has a Mesh application for Mac being developed, so offering an iPhone application isn’t such a large leap. With forecast sales of 10million in 2008, it won’t be long until it the iPhone catches up to the 20million Windows Mobile are predicting – with mobile usage rapidly increasing why drive these users away from using other Microsoft products and services such as Windows Live.

In case you missed it, Google released a new toy into beta today, called Lively.  In a nod to Software + Services, you download and install an app in Windows, and then log in to Lively.  Here’s a description of what happens next from Google Blogoscoped:

Once you logged into a room, you can start customizing your avatar. First you can pick from a base type – like male, female or animal – and then you can fine-tune your hair, skin color, eyes and more. You’ll then see yourself surrounded by other avatars, and there’s background music and lots of laughing, grunting and other noises. The graphic has a lighthearted cartoon touch, reminiscent of something like a Lucasarts 3D game. When you talk by using the chat box at the bottom, your words appear as speech bubble above your character.

Lively exists in “rooms” you create, which according to Google’s Niniane Wang, express your personality:

If you enter a Lively room embedded on your favorite blog or website, you can immediately get a sense of the room creator’s interests, just by looking at the furniture and environment they chose. You can also express your own personality by customizing your avatar’s look, showing people who you are without having to say a word. Of course, you can chat with each other, and you can also interact through animated actions.

(screenshot from Google Blogoscoped)

Another 3D product, to probably their great dismay, was announced (well announced again) on the same day as Lively.  Vivaty, a new company with a new product, Scenes.  This one works with Facebook and AIM, currently:

So what does this all have to do with Windows Live?  Well our friend Jamie Thomson wondered the same thing.  Now we really admire Jamie’s passion about Windows Live, but sometimes his blog posts are long on wishful thinking and short on fact.  This time, however, he lays out a compelling case for Windows Live working on some 3D magic of their own.  His synopsis:

1. In Fall (I call it Autumn) 2007 a Microsoft exec said to expect big things in about a year or so.
2. There's a big Virtual Earth release coming up in fall 2008 so says a Virtual Earth evangelist.
3. Someone involved with building 3D models in Virtual Earth has come out and said that Microsoft are building a virtual world using Virtual Earth.

(links added from the original blog post)

In addition, if you watch the Channel 9 video that Sunshine posted here this morning, Mark Brown (hey the same VE Evangelist that said there’s a big release coming this fall – oooh the plot thickens!) interviews two guys who work on the UltraCam, and they are all about separating the plant material from buildings, etc., and also capturing perspective views of buildings.  If you listen closely to the video, you’ll begin to understand that much of what appears in Live Maps 3D is being captured and created (and planned for from the get-go) in the camera and the software.

And of course there’s the whole 3DVia piece, where all kinds of 3D objects can be constructed and included in Live Maps 3D.

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UPDATE:  Was just reminded of the Microsoft acquisition of Caligari, who already have a 3D rendering product out – TrueSpace:

Will we be seeing something from these guys soon?

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When Live Maps 3d was first demoed, it included advertising in the form of billboards that were inserted into scenes.  Those quickly disappeared, but the technology to add to the 3D scenes (and the concept of having advertising within Live Maps 3D) has been around since the beginning.  Again, here’s Matt Baron, the 3DVia guy quoted above:

First they are building the real world, and step by step they are coming closer to a fully immersive environment.

While both Lively and Vivaty are interesting, especially Lively with the power of Google behind it, neither one of these products seems like much of a step forward from Second Life, which while it took off at first, has kind of lost its edge.  Will a more fully immersive environment, with direct ties to the real world, take the next step in 3D?  While we don’t have any solid information, we think Jamie might just be on to something.