MobileBrett

Along with the iPhone hardware and software updates, Apple announced that .Mac was going to be replaced with a new service called MobileMe, which brings push features for mail, calendar, and contacts as well as rich Web apps to access them.  The technology is very impressive and I'm very excited to use it.  The disappointing part is that I'm going to change email services again.

I've written about going from Gmail to .Mac for my email, and back to Gmail again.  In order to enjoy MobileMe's push email (where the server notifies the client when a new email has been received, as opposed to the client periodically polling) and new Web apps, which appear to be superior to Gmail's, I need to receive all of my email through it.

Even though I can just forward my Gmail address to MobileMe (which also gives me the benefit of Gmail's awesome spam filter), switching still sucks because I won't have my email history from the past three years in one place.  However I had the same consequences moving from Yahoo to Gmail and I don't remember it being a big deal (how often does one really need to dig up old email?).

The nice thing is that whenever I update a contact or calendar event on my computer it will be pushed to my iPhone immediately (and vice versa).  Plus MobileMe is a little cleaner to use Mail.app with than Gmail.

Should it make me nervous that I am continually growing more and more dependent on Apple's products?  They all integrate very well, which makes the single vendor dependence worthwhile, but if Apple closed up shop tomorrow I would be stuck migrating to different applications and services for much of my digital life.