iPhone 2.0 and MobileMe

So I got my iPhone upgraded to the new 2.0 firmware and am (mostly) pleased. The App store is a fun wonderland of surprises both good and bad, but I'm enjoying the adventure in finding the really great apps and cutting away the crap.

Some of the ones that have earned a place on my iPhone are Apple's "Remote", AIM, Showtimes, Bloomberg, Shazam (which is amazing -- hold the iPhone up to music and it tells you what the song is, and even lets you go to the iTunes music store to buy it! This is a killer app!), Twitterific, WeatherBug, and the NY Times. Oh, and I do like Pandora.

I also was happy to see MobileMe roll out. Not so much because I was interested in the new features (which are nice, to be honest), but mostly because I hoped this meant that they finally rewrote the code that did synchronization and gave it some serious stability enhancements. As I've written about before, .Mac was essentially useless and only sporadically synchronized anything. Most of the time, it was a fun game of "Guess where your data is now?", and I was always the loser.

MobileMe has, so far, been rock-solid in the synchronization department. That is, data on my Mac manages to get to my iPhone, and back. However, it isn't truly "push", like Apple claimed: From the Mac to MobileMe, it's on a 15-minute timed schedule (at best), or you can push manually. Same from MobileMe back to the Mac. But the iPhone is, as far as I can tell, true Push in that if you make a change that affects the MobileMe cloud, the iPhone gets the update very quickly.

I'm just happy I've lost no data, and data seems to synchronize correctly. Even bookmarks, which has been a very contentious issue for me in the past.

One thing that persists from the .Mac days is that the Web interface sometimes has little resemblance to the actual state of your synchronized data. For instance, when I first synchronized my contacts, my iPhone and Mac had them properly in sync, but the Web MobileMe interface showed all sorts of incorrect and incomplete data. About a half-hour later, the Web interface had caught up. I suspect they do a ton of caching on the Web interface, and it does not truly show the state of your data until things have stopped synchronizing for a while and the webcache has a chance to catch up.

I'd like to see that fixed, but hey, I'm not complaining too much so far. My main gripes so far about MobileMe are:

• MobileMe PC sync doesn't support the use of proxies. Proxies. As in, those things that corporations love to use to keep their employees safe from that bad-evil Internet. As in, the one place that I really need MobileMe to sync my Outlook calendar from, I can't. Because the client won't work behind my corporation's firewall. How utterly useless is that?
• To-Dos on the Web calendar are completely broken. Oh, they sync from the desktop okay and all, but (1) it never remembers that I want to show the To-Do pane, and (2) Entering to-do's on the Web form is a hit-or-miss proposition: Sometimes, the To-Dos stick, sometimes they don't, and sometimes you get six "New ToDo" instead of the six things you really needed to remember. Welcome to Web 2.0, Apple-style.
• And as long as we're talking about To-Dos, where are they on the iPhone? Still MIA. Seriously. My Blackberry has to-dos, so does my Windows Mobile device. But not on the iPhone. Only on your computer and on the Web, if it works at all.
• It's not pushed to/from the PC/Mac. Why?
• The Webapp is pretty busted, between not accurately reflecting your MobileMe data, to the To-Do issue above. Let's get stability on that, please.

And as long as I'm on a roll, some iPhone 2.0 complaints as well:

• Stability! Apps crash, hang, act oddly and cause instability in other parts of the phone. My iPhone bogged down so badly after running Pandora that it finally needed a reboot. (I thought this whole Apple-controls-the-iPhone experience was to make the phone more stable, not less?)
• Actually let's revisit that: STABILITY! Even if I don't run any third-party installed apps, I've noticed that the iPhone isn't as snappy or smooth as it once was. The slick zooms and wipes now stutter or just "pop" to full-screen, the input fields stagger to catch up with your typing, and so forth. I hope there's a 2.0.1 around the corner to address these issues.
• No cut and paste. Is it that hard?
• No background apps, but this is being remedied with the notification service
• AT&T still sucks. This isn't an iPhone problem per se, except that when you are using such a generally awesome network-connected device, it really hits home whenever the network is unavailable or slow. With AT&T, you never really know when your phone is going to work, even if you have a signal. Most of the time, I know it isn't going to work, because it says "No network". I want a Verizon-connected iPhone...

Overall, though, there's a lot here, and I'm enjoying the new applications immensely. I also appreciate that MobileMe actually does synchronize data properly so far, and I'm ready to move to iCal now as my primary calendar.

If only I could use MobileMe from work through our firewall! I hope that upgrade happens quickly.