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Contacts and calendar events are updated shortly after changes are made on an iPhone and online when viewing your information at me.com. It usually took anywhere from 15 to 60 seconds or so for the update to propagate throughout my accounts; to view the change at me.com I occasionally needed to refresh the page or click to another item, suggesting that my browser may have been holding on to a cached version of the outdated record even though the actual information had been updated in the cloud.
iCal and Address Book records under Leopard are updated every 15 minutes (and therefore are not “pushed” when edited, a clarification Apple made after the launch; Tiger syncs hourly). However, calendar and address book updates sometimes applied regardless of the settings I chose in the MobileMe preference pane: with syncing set to Manual, I still watched MobileMe occasionally reach out for updates on its own, though the behavior was inconsistent.
It’s one thing to just copy an updated contact or event from one machine to another; the real test is whether MobileMe can synchronize more granular data such as specific fields within a contact record. To test, I updated a contact’s Work phone number field in three separate locations (in Address Book, on an iPhone, and on the Web), which resulted in no errors when the changes were synchronized among the other devices. I edited the Web version only a few seconds after the iPhone’s version, and the iPhone was almost immediately updated to the Web version’s number.
In fact, after syncing dozens of times over the course of a few days, I ran into serious trouble only once. On my Mac, I signed out of my MobileMe account so I could sign in with my mother-in-law’s account (I convinced her to use MobileMe so that I could access her machine remotely using Back to My Mac, whose features are unchanged). After performing some remote troubleshooting for her, I signed back into my MobileMe account and changed a contact’s phone numbers in Address Book and on the Web for testing.
However, signing off and then back in again turned off my sync settings and unchecked each item in the preference pane, and MobileMe thought I was signing in on a different computer. Enabling syncing prompted me to confirm that this was the same computer, but all of the updated phone numbers appeared within the test contact’s record.
Apple acknowledged that the company is being “conservative” by disabling syncing by default when you sign into your account, and that the service isn’t designed for repeatedly signing in and out of multiple accounts. A better option in my case (and I suspect I’m not the only one doing this) is to set up a separate user account on your machine and sign in to other MobileMe accounts there.
Sync conflicts do arise when the same record has been changed at more than one source. In those cases, Apple’s approach of displaying the troublemaking records side-by-side has always been helpful, but I frequently want more information. On several occasions I was notified of sync conflicts for values in records that appeared identical. A modification date and time at least would be more helpful.
Mail also gets the quick-sync treatment for iPhone owners, with messages being optionally delivered as they arrive, even when the phone is not active. I don’t need that type of always-on access to my e-mail, so the ping and buzz from the iPhone indicating new mail was a frequent surprise. For people who need to be more plugged in than I do, this MobileMe feature will be welcome.
Synchronizing data between machines is largely unchanged for people who want to replicate one environment as much as possible on two machines. In my testing, full synchronization didn’t always happen right away after I’d changed my information, particularly with Mail accounts (creating and deleting an account); performing a manual sync on both computers
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