iPad: The Missing Manual

Chapter 16. Sync Up with MobileMe

Even though your iPad is a cool personal media center, under the hood, it’s a computer (a sleek one, yes, but a computer nonetheless). Odds are, you have another one or two computers in your life—at work, at home, or both. You may have an iPhone, too. Each of these devices can send and receive email, store contact information, keep track of your appointments, and save website bookmarks. Wouldn’t it be great if all these gadgets could share the same information, and you could keep them constantly up-to-date?

That’s where Apple’s MobileMe service comes in. For an annual subscription fee of $100, MobileMe keeps your personal information in sync across all your gadgets: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, PC, and Mac—or any combination thereof. If you update a phone number in the iPad’s Contacts program, MobileMe pushes that change out to your iPhone and Windows computer at home—saving you the trouble of both remembering to do it then actually doing it. Pretty nifty, eh?

But that’s not all MobileMe does. You also get an email account, a photo-sharing service, and a bunch of remote storage. Turn the page to get the details.

Sign Up for MobileMe

First, a little bit more about MobileMe. For one, it’s not an Internet service provider that gives you Internet access—you still have to pay your cable or DSL company for that. Instead, it’s an Internet service that syncs your ...