MobileMe

Apple has made a few minor updates to their MobileMe online information syncing / management / storage service. One of the more significant changes is that Find My Phone is now accessible from the main search bar, making it easier and faster to get to in MobileMe's online interface.

Yet another iPhone thief has been snared by MobileMe. The Journal News reports that Marvin Brown (25) and Christopher Davis (22) were arrested after stealing four iPhones totaling in $3,594 from an Apple Store. The thieves were successfully tracked down and arrested using the built-in GPS tracking feature utilized by the MobileMe feature Find My Phone, which led cops directly to their location.

Apple has added a couple of improvements to their cloud service, MobileMe, adding improvements to Mail, Gallery, iDisk, account settings, push contacts, and calenders, and Back to My Mac. Among the changes are the ability to forward or reply to an HTML or rich text message while retaining the format instead of converting to plain text.

iPhone OS 3.0 has only been released for a few days, and the new MobileMe locating feature Find My Phone has already been successfully used. As the story goes, iPhone user Kevin Miller was in Chicago for a Lego convention. Well, he was in a bar with a couple of friends and his iPhone was stolen, and... well, it's a great story. Go check it out at his website.
[via Cult Of Mac]

MobileMe users running the iPhone OS 3.0 gold master copy are reporting that Find My iPhone, a new feature Apple announced at WWDC on Monday as part of MobileMe, is already up and running. Everything we've heard so far says that it works perfectly, just as they described in the keynote address. It's good to know it will be ready when the 17th rolls around, when it will be available to all users of GPS-capable iPhones with MobileMe accounts.

Lost amongst the other items yesterday was Apple's (silent) announcement of an iDisk application for MobileMe customers. The app will allow users to access files stored on their MobileMe iDisk from their iPhone or iPod touch. iWork and Microsoft Office documents, as well as PDFs, audio, and video can can all be opened using the app. Files can't be downloaded, although it does cache recently viewed documents. Files can also be shared from the app and public folders are available as well.

When it's released, the iDisk app will be free.

An iPhone thief was caught after the stolen device synced to MobileMe. iPhone user Rob was at the dry cleaner's one day when his iPhone was stolen. His immediate reaction was to assume it was gone forever, and bought a new one that night. Much to his surprise, contacts started appearing on his new phone. The thief was entering the information of his closest friends onto the device, and MobileMe was syncing them to his new phone over-the-air.

After Apple's less than flattering stumble during and following the launch of MobileMe, they promised they would put their efforts into fixing it and making it as great as they hyped it to be. Yesterday they posted details on their most recent update to the service in late September.

Apple has released update v1.2 for their MobileMe control panel for Windows. The new version "provides better support for syncing a large number of contacts (more than 2,000) and prevents syncing of data between Microsoft Exchange Server and MobileMe, a configuration that is not supported." You can grab the update at Apple.com.
[via TUAW]

Apple released the MobileMe control Panel 1.1 for Windows. The control panel is required for MobileMe users running Windows in order to enable sync with the computer. It also gives simple control over MobileMe iDisk for storing and sharing information with your online Me.com account. The update requires Windows XP or Vista, iTunes 8.0, and a MobileMe account. The new MobileMe Control Panel can be downloaded from Apple's site.