iDelete ...EPIC FAIL!! - Susan Beebe

When I picked up my iPhone this morning, the salesman was trying fairly hard to get me to sign up for MobileMe but I kept on pushing him off, saying that I wanted to mess with the trial a little more before I committed. Very, very glad I did that. - Akiva Moskovitz

I use MobileMe and so far, no issues. knock-on-wood - Rom Feria

Been using MobileMe since it was called iTools and free with very few issues ever. It keeps my contacts and my calendars and my mail settings synced between 3 Macs. - Adam Turetzky

Is there a known set of circumstances in which this occurs, or are the circumstances fairly random? - Ontario Emperor from fftogo

No reason, no idea why it happened? I understand it's bad news for you, and could be for others, but couldn't this be a random incident? Isn't it a little hasty to go telling everyone MobileMe is a disaster? - Tim Hoeck from NoiseRiver

Thanks Robert. Signed up for MobileMe, but have yet to investigate. Looks like you saved me the trouble! - Bill Sanders

Tim: lots of other people I trust are having troubles with it too. It could be a random incident, but I'd rather have my readers be very careful with this. I've never seen this behavior before. No idea why it happened and since it's taken me more than two hours of resynching with Google Calendar to try to get it back I'm not very likely to try it again. Uninstall. - Robert Scoble

Walt Mossberg says not to go for Mobile Me either. What is his headline? "Apple's Mobileme is far too flawed to be reliable.": http://ptech.allthingsd.com/2008072... - Robert Scoble

I gave MobileMe a rather rigorous testing for a week, and found it to be just one aggravating issue after the next. http://tinyurl.com/6lnzg6 if you care to read. - Evan Sims

Is this just an Outlook problem? Or can it affect iCal too? - John

John: I don't know. I'm using Mobile Me on a Windows Vista computer with Outlook 2007. - Robert Scoble

Thanks. I just backed up my iCal just in case. Apple needs to get their sh!t together. First iPhone 2.0 and then of course the MobileMe disaster. - John

Thank god, this is one of the few mishaps of MobileMe that didn't happen to me, yet. Woke up to deleted contacts on my iPhone one morning. Thank god, they were "only" deleted on the phone, so nothing was lost. But it just makes you remember: "When was the last backup?" - Holger Eilhard

I don't like to rant about Apple, but don't they test this stuff. what about 2.0 firmware for iPod touch and iPhones that is really unstable with the appstore? I know they can't test every config, but atleast try to work out the bugs. Everyday I here of another mobileMe disasters.. I'm happy I still have old treo, which is buggy too, but at least it won't automatically delete my contacts and appointments for me... - Sebastiaan van den Akker

I don't have my calendar on MobileMe, but I know it screwed up my address book. - Francine Hardaway

While there's probably a unique circumstance in which this happens, the fact it is possible at all is scary to say the least. - Sam Law

I have found that redundacy is a good thing. Which is why I keep more then one calendar. - Paul from twhirl

Are there any free and/or open source products which fulfill the same features as MobileMe? Preferably open source so anyone can just up and install as required. - Scott Jarkoff

Before making such proclamations, you might want to do a little homework. Did you even talk to MobileMe tech support? http://www.apple.com/support.... There might have been a simple fix had you checked. I've been using MobileMe since July 18th; I sync three Macs and my iPhone and haven't had any major issues. I'm adding an XP laptop next; I don't expect any problems with that either. - Albert Willis

Albert: a simple fix? Google Calendar has been going for six hours recreating my calendar so far. This was a problem with Outlook. I have 8,400+ calendar entries. It's only recreated 2,400 of them so far. Sigh. Macs don't even have Outlook so, of course you haven't had problems yet. Hope nothing bad happens on your XP machine. I'd back up just in case. At least my calendar will be back tomorrow cause I had a backup. - Robert Scoble

That is, there could have been something Apple could have done to restore your calendar entries, assuming you synced your calendars to MobileMe. That would have been worth a shot. Again, we don't know the culprit here, between Outlook, Vista, MobileMe and whatever else is installed on your machine. I've done enough tech support to know we don't have the complete story here. - Albert Willis

Albert: no, once the calendar entries were deleted, you needed to move them over from somewhere else. There was no way in hell I was going to let it touch my calendars anymore after that. I know Google Calendar will work. My trust in this is shot. - Robert Scoble

I know it's not as critical a failure as calendar but you should try the gallery...I struggled with using it and sharing it for a week before giving up and going back to flickr... - Kamath (नमः)

I didn't have any problems with calendars on MobileMe, but it decided one morning to delete all of my contacts bar three. That was the point at which I decided I'd move back to using Exchange, which Just Works on the iPhone, and (via Entourage) on my Mac. And amazingly, I had people trying to tell me it wasn't Apple's fault, despite it being Apple technology, running Apple software, on an Apple machine! - Ian Betteridge

people love to piss on apple these days, ain't that right? Exchange deletes calendars as well as google calendar. It just happens. Ask an exchange admin how much fun it is to run that b*tch ;) - muzo

muzo: I dare you to come up with any Fortune 1,000 CTO who says that Exchange deleted a calendar like this with a recent version of Exchange. - Robert Scoble

yeah, but from the user end it WORKS. get it? Exchange == most worthwhile product MS produces. Period. I'm going to bed. - Andrew Feinberg

Andrew: right. And anyway, Apple is the beneficiary of more free good PR than any other tech company around. - Robert Scoble

It's a version 1 Apple product - that means "early beta" in anyone else's language. - Andrew Garrett

With every post I get happier that I did not waste my $100 on mobile fail. - Bob Blunk

I'm incredibly sad to hear that this implementation is failing so badly. It's a utopian feature we all benefit from. If Robert ditches this and convinces other to, Apple will really miss out of good feedback from the community. Anyone found out if Apple responded to this major setback? - Mark Aitken

Not worth the very limited utility given the fact that it won't sync up with Google Calendar, either. I got MobileMe through my brother's family plan, and still had to buy Spanning Sync to do that. And I have to keep the intermediary computer on (my home iMac) because it doesn't sync OTA. There's got to be something better than this... - Jason Menayan

Had the initial trouble with MobleMe during the .Mac switch and have stopped using it - even though I paid good money for the service. On the flip side, I'm finding Live Mesh to be surprisingly more useful and it's a free "Tech Preview." Go figure. - Paul Dain

For those who would like to uninstall Movile Me: http://tinyurl.com/6q37oo Talks you through the process. - Paul

I had some initial problems with the service but it's quite stable for me, so far. - John Staton