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Just a few days ago, my MobileMe trial ran out and I was forced to hand over my card details once again to Apple. I haven’t thought about the service much throughout the time I’ve been using it, it’s just been part of my computing needs. But now with competitors such as Google offering a very similar service for free, you have to ask yourself whether MobileMe is worth it.

I’ll tell you straight off that I personally think MobileMe is worth buying, but maybe not at the price of $99. For e-mail, online storage and push syncing, that’s a high price in anyone’s books. There’s no reason why the e-mail couldn’t be free, and push transfer will probably become standard within the next few years. 20GB of online storage is great to have, but there are still many free alternatives.

I originally decided to buy MobileMe for two main reasons. The first being to host my blog, using iWeb for the design. After a few months however, I became unsatisfied with the lack of freedom for creation within iWeb and have since moved to WordPress. The other reason for buying MobileMe is one that I’d rather not confess to. For $99 a year, I love having @me.com. I know, it’s sad—practically a waste of money when, for free, I can have @gmail.com or @live.com.

So the price is a little high for the service, I’ve now established that. But something that you would expect from Apple, as a paying customer, is for them to deliver what you’ve bought into. I mean, specifically, push e-mail. Quite often I find that e-mails have not been pushed to Mail on my Mac or iPhone. While this isn’t such a problem, once you’ve become used to it, you really notice it when it’s missing. It also doesn’t take a lot for the iDisk to become quite slow when moving a lot of files around. This obviously depends on your broadband connection, but I feel there can be some improvement made to the iDisk’s connectivity, whether though me.com/idisk or via Finder directly.

On the plus side however, synchronization between devices is brilliant. I always know that if I update a contact or calendar entry on my Mac, within minutes it’s sitting on my iPhone. Always being up to date wherever I am is a nice feeling. There’s no worry if there’s something happening that you should be attending, or someone you meant to call but their number is only on your Mac. If it’s on one device, it’s also on the other. Everything is also synchronized with The Cloud, so all this information is accessible online from anywhere in the world.

There’s no denying that MobileMe still has issues. It’s original launch was very confusing, with problems with the servers and customers on the previous .mac service. But beyond the hiccups, there’s a solid base set for an excellent service, and it’s a great addition for any Mac user. If Apple can concentrate on ironing out any issues customers find, and if they can lower the price to around the $50 mark, then I think more and more people will begin to see MobileMe as a justifiable option, and not something they want but can’t explain to themselves why it would be worth $99. Apple has a good service available to those who want it. With some refining, it could easily be a great service.

Product [MobileMe]