MobileMe is a service from Apple which many of you will no doubt have heard of before; the service replaced .Mac and in doing so brought more emphasis to having your data ‘in the cloud’ and it being ‘pushed’ (or at least nearly pushed) to all your devices. I myself have been a .Mac subscriber for just under a year so was salivating when i heard the new of the update, however, the transition to MobileMe was anything but smooth and has left many, many subscribers with “rocky” service (to quote Apple themselves).

At first the ‘groundbreaking’ web applications promised for your email, contacts and calendars simply failed to load for almost every MobileMe member. Apple now claims that this was due to “a lot more traffic to our servers than” they anticipated. They now assure us that they’ve “since added server capacity and tuned our software to scale better”. So, this would seem all well and good, however, there is one more major issue. For the last week or so many MobileMe users have been shouting from the hilltops, saying that their MobileMe email either on the desktop or on iPhone is simply not working. After a few days Apple did acknowledge this problem, but went on to say it was only affecting 1% of MobileMe users.

Yesterday, Apple had this to say about the issue:

“Last Friday a serious problem with one of our mail servers blocked those members’ access to their MobileMe mail accounts. As of today a team was able to restore limited web access to those accounts so the affected members can use their browsers to read mail that has arrived since last Friday (though not before) as well as send and receive new mail.”

Apple’s MobileMe support staff also say they expect all email accounts to be functioning fully by the end of next week. What’s more Apple is now saying that at least 10% of email messages sent to this “1%” of subscribers between the 16th and 18th of July have been lost.

With the advent of the MobileMe service many people, such as myself, have left their previous email provider (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail…) and have attempted a complete switch over to MobileMe. This extended and hellish debacle will no doubt have made many switchers question their actions and perhaps already turn back to their old email service. None of this can be construed as anything but awful news for Apple.

One interesting development came yesterday on the MobileMe support pages however. As a gesture to show understanding and sympathy this page now tells us that Steve Jobs has personally requested a member of his team to “write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what’s happening with MobileMe”. The anonymous poster says they are working alongside the MobileMe engineers so will have up to date information at every moment.

Despite all of this hideous trouble, MobileMe is shaping up to be a good, useful service. There is certainly a lot more work to be done in the way of stability, scaling and new features, but if Apple can eradicate these problems and listen to their users’ requests MobileMe could be in for a long and fruitful life to come.

One thing whilst browsing around today that was not difficult to notice was the rumour that Apple may be ditching UK network O2, current service providers for the iPhone and letting Orange get in on some of the action. This is according to Ernest Doku, a blogger who said that he had received from information from very credible sources on the matter.

The reasoning behind this rumour may stem from the fact that O2 recently cocked up the iPhone 3G launch, and although many other networks in other countries have had problems, O2’s troubles began before the phone was even released, when the pre-order system online collapsed, leaving many, including myself, dissapointed without any iPhones to satisy our needs. Two weeks after the troubles of July 11th, O2 explain that they are sure everyone will have one by the end of the summer (over a month away…).

Now although Apple have signed contracts with carriers in most countries for each network to have exclusivity of the iPhone, the terms and conditions of their contract with O2 may allow Apple to override this and join with a second carrier. Of course, the T&C’s of this deal have never been seen, so we are basically guessing here.

This may be some bloggers attempt at 15 minutes in the spotlight, but the reasoning for such a move on Apple’s part makes complete sense, and would surely deal a massive blow to O2, who would no longer be the only carrier able to offer the iPhone on it’s network.

To read about this more, take a look at The Registers article.

I’ve been working hard to get all the site back up and everything, and now I can finally open it all back up and start posting again. Hopefully, we shall have our usual posters, Joel, Phelim and Daniel back to write our news.

To those who remember what the site looked like before the “big crash”, this isn’t the same theme, it’s a totally rewritten one that basically looks exactly the same, so I am pretty happy with it. I have added some new things such as the quick news bar above, which is our Twitter feed parsed into a nice line.

The feeds are back up once again, once we get the podcast up, I will be adding a link for our podcast feed.

For now, why don’t you join our MyBlogLog site or use some of the links you can find on the sidebar on the right?

Watch this space for more…

Just a quick note to say that TechRave will be returning very soon so keep your feeds hot!

Right now I am posting from the awesome Wordpress app for the iPhone.

You can even take photos and put ones from your library into the post very easily. This will be very very handy when I am out and about and I need to get around and blog. As you use the iPhone typing gets much easier so it doesn’t worry me so much.

Just testing my gallery post, hopefully the Lightbox works.