Apple has gotten to the core of the problems plaguing the company’s MobileMe Internet service since its July launch, and has resolved several technical glitches.
Subscribers to MobileMe have been dealing with problems since the service launched and, in an e-mail to employees just weeks after the launch, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted the company prematurely released the service. What MobileMe is supposed to do is keep e-mail, contacts and calendars up to date across several devices, including an iPhone, iPod touch, Mac and PC. Instead, it has been a mobile mess.
Challenges have included problems with the Reply All function, Internet Explorer 7 issues, and difficulties with keyboard shortcuts. Other challenges included using the MobileMe Calendar in Mozilla and Firefox 3, and problems with the MobileMe Gallery, where users share photos with friends and family.
Jobs, in his e-mail to employees made public, said it was not the company’s finest hour, and the service needed more testing and should not have been launched at the same time as the iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software, and the App Store.
Apple corrected several issues, but did so in stealth mode by not alerting its customers to the upgrade or posting any news about the update on its blog. Instead, the company issued an article about MobileMe’s recent improvements and resolutions of known problems.
“Apple is always working to improve MobileMe,” the company said. “Since MobileMe is primarily a server-side, or ‘cloud’-based, service, the MobileMe team can make improvements and push updates to MobileMe without any action being required of MobileMe customers. Since server-side updates are a bit more innocuous than a standard software update to Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows, it’s easy not to notice that updates are occurring. Usually the only hint of these updates is that things just ‘work better.'”
Resolutions to…