Apple's MobileMe - .Mac by any other name?

Apple’s also introduced a companion service to go with the new 3G iPhone, called MobileMe – a cloud storage service that looks like a revamped version of its old .Mac product.

In short, MobileMe will give you remote access to your Mail, Contacts and Calendar, as well as photos and documents using a series of web based applications, whether you’re using accessing them through an iPhone, iPod touch, Mac or PC. All your personal content is kept centrally off in the ‘cloud’ (on the internet to you and me) so you can get hold of it just by going online. If you lose your phohe or laptop, or don’t happen to have it handy, you can just log in on another PC and all your goodies are right there in front of you.

US pricing is $99 a year, and you get 20GB of storage for that – double what .Mac provided. Apple isn’t the first company to sell this sort of cloud computing service but its relaunching it at a good time to capitalise on the wave of iPhone sign ups and pitching it rather neatly as ‘Exchange for the rest of us’. Without the iPhone, .Mac looked a little limp – every Mac/PC user knows by now to back up the contents of their machine – but with iPhone capabilities added in and the ability to recover the contents of the device if you lose it, suddenly MobileMe looks like it’s got legs.