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Apple continues to release products others can’t

Apple just gets it. Today they announced the iPhone 3G, a thinner, faster, and more affordable iPhone. I continue to be fascinated by how they take difficult or time-consuming processes and make them easy. Take for example MobileMe.

How will Plaxo respond to MobileMe?

As a die-hard Plaxo user, MobileMe seems to be a fairly significant threat to Plaxo. In the wake of Comcast's recent purchase of Plaxo, I would imagine Plaxo will be find itself in a difficult position to continue innovating as it works through the transition to Comcast ownership and business processes.

Apple has quite simply leap-frogged Plaxo in features and functionality that I currently pay $60/year for with Plaxo: Address book and calendar syncing. Plaxo also has other bells and whistles such as contact "networking" features (a la LinkedIn) and Plaxo Pulse (a la Friendster -- essentially a "life stream" of your data)...neither of which I pay the yearly fee for. Calendar and contact syncing is where the value is for me.

MobileMe goes beyond address & calendar syncing

Most importantly, MobileMe will also sync email, photos, and files. As I hop between an enterprise BlackBerry, an iMac at home, and a MacBook Pro for work (running VMWare so I can play nicely in the Windows world), the MobileMe synchronization is really the best of everything. No matter which environment I'm in, I'll have access to my most frequently-used data.

MobileMe could be the ticket

While I'm not about to switch email addresses, the photo and file syncing are very nice add-ons for the $99/year fee with 20GB of storage. Google's Picasa photo hosting only provides 2GB of storage (it's free, though) and DropBox (for file sharing) is still in its infancy. Is this enough to convince me to buy an iPhone? Only if it'll work with Enterprise email. MobileMe however looks to be the ticket when it comes out (with or without an iPhone). I'll be testing the 60-day trial for sure.