Wednesday, April 14, 2010

iPad Test Drive: MobileMe

Okay, so... MobleMe is an interesting product from Apple designed to get around the fact that you can't store files directly on the iPad and you can't connect it up to your computer as an external hard drive.  There are actually two apps that you have to download to use the online storage features that I personally thought could be all obtained within one app.

For instance, if you upload a picture from your iPhone to MobileMe, wouldn't you expect the picture to show up in the iDisk app's Picture section?  No, Apple didn't think so.  Apple wants you to download their second app, Gallery.

Fine, I can handle that.  But the Gallery app isn't even made for the iPad.  Apple simply took an iPhone app and threw it into the iPad section of the store.  Even the interface is iPhone-sized, forcing you to use the iPhone-style keypad for data entry instead of the native iPad keyboard.  This from the same company that couldn't be bothered to throw in foreign language input support that already exists for the iPhone...

But still!  No big deal, right?  Until you get to the final kicker of the whole ordeal:  There is no way to delete a picture that you've uploaded to MobileMe using either iDisk or Gallery.  You have to log on to the MobileMe website to manage or delete the pictures you uploaded.

Oh, and by the way, you can't do this from the iPad because Safari for iPad is not a real browser.