The service took the better part of a day to get setup correctly.  After getting my contacts perfect on my iPhone, I synced them to Address Book on the Mac only to find out that the format was slightly different on the two devices.  I spent a fair amount of time editing contants for companies, for example, to “file” correctly.

Then, thinking that everything was going to align perfectly again, I synced with MobileMe…only to find that the format was just a bit different again.  Arrggg!  My APPLE Mac, my APPLE iPhone, and my APPLE MobileMe service all have different formats for contact information?!?  Come on, now!  Seriously.

The fun didn’t stop there.  I got all of the APPLE products looking nice and then (bravely) decided to bring Microsoft’s tools into the mix.  You guessed it!

This is why it took so long to get my contacts groomed.  All 504 of them (down from 628 after removing duplicates, etc.).  I played that game a few times until everything was perfect.  I won’t even tell you how much of a hassle syncing the calendars was!

But, for all of that pain in the butt configuration, MobileMe has turned out to be exactly what I was looking for.  My email, contacts, and calendars (all four of them) are all perfectly synced and available where ever I’m at – on my Windows Vista laptop, my Mac Mini, my iPhone, and even on the web.  Nirvana does exist!

Don’t get me wrong, I still have some problems, but I’ve learned to live with them.  For example, if I read several messages on my iPhone and delete them, they may pop back up a minute or two later.  A simple tap of the Refresh button trashes them again – and for good this time.  I shouldn’t have to do that, but it seems a small price to pay to be able to use all of the great Mac apps like Mail.app and iCal and still have the ability to use my laptop to read filed emails.

Let’s hope Apple continues to work on MobileMe to make it more consistent and reliable.  Otherwise, “Exchange for the rest of us” is going to look more like Microsoft Bob….