I have an Apple MobileMe account - in fact, I got it back when it was known as .Mac.

I've been trying to weigh up the pros and cons of using MobileMe versus a load of other services, and I'm finding it harder and harder to justify the price tag. That being said, the price for me isn't as steep as it is for others - I actually buy a Family Pack every year that I then split between a few others - namely my wife, my sister-in-law and my friends Claira and Claire. It keeps the price pretty reasonable.

But what does MobileMe offer that I can't get for free elsewhere?

The most obvious offering of Apple's is their email service - it pushes the email out to my iPhone pretty much instantaneously. However, Gmail can do the same thing if you set it up as a Microsoft Exchange server, which also can handle Contacts and Calendar syncing, two of the other major benefits of MobileMe. Also, MobileMe doesn't allow you to send mail with a custom domain name - Gmail does this easily.

Online storage? I get 20gb combined from Apple, but let's face it - DropBox does this stuff much better. Its integration into the Finder and their iPhone app are much better than Apple's iDisk - so much so that many think Apple should just buy DropBox and appropriate their technology into MobileMe.

As for online photo storage? Google's Picasa service works like a dream. Videos? YouTube! Vimeo! These are much more mature offerings than Apple's MobileMe Galleries which much more in the way of social media functions, which, lets face it, is how most people will be sharing the content they want to upload.

Bookmark syncing? Google Chrome for Mac Beta was just updated yesterday with this feature, and it works a lot smoother than Apple's MobileMe Sync feature, which is kind of hard to admit... I've also found that it runs a bit better than Safari, and looks almost exactly the same.

I don't know if there is a free solution to handle the Keychain/Mail/Settings syncing of MobileMe - I suspect there could well be one, but this post is just to do with what is glaringly obvious out there...

Which, as far as I can tell, leaves Find My iPhone. And this is kind of a dealbreaker, ladies, because it's actually an incredibly useful service that I can't see Google ever being able to replicate - same goes for the remote-wipe of iPhones.

So, have I missed anything? Find My iPhone, Remote-Wipe and MobileMe Sync? That's what I'm paying the guts of £20 for, essentially?

Actually, when you put it like that, it doesn't seem so bad.

My recommendation - buy the MobileMe Family pack between you and 4 mates and enjoy it if you need the