I'm not exactly the average computer user. At the moment, I'm continuing my ongoing experiment with the Eee PC. However, one of the big hassles I've faced is maintaining a single calendar that is kept up to date across my various systems - an iMac in the office, my MacBook Pro and the Eee PC (running Windows XP and Office 2007). Throw in a Nokia N95 and iPod touch and it becomes a reasonably complex task.

As part of the iPhone 3G roll out last weekend Apple deployed a new iteration of their .Mac service and renamed the whole thing MobileMe. In truth, it's not all that different to the old .Mac except that the web-based interface has been given a once-over and you can now view your calendar online. The big plus is that it can sync with Outlook. The idea is that you can keep your iPhone or iPod touch and computer all in sync. If your diary changes on one of the systems, the changes will almost instantaneously in the other system. It's also interesting that the name MobileMe doesn't bear the "Mac" brand and there's no Apple branding once you're using the online service.

I've seen MobileMe as an opportunity to sync the calendar in Outlook on the Eee PC and my two Macs. The trick has been to make sure that I had one system that was perfect before I started and to then take a backup. I then used MobileMe's new sync tool (installed to System Preferences on the Mac or Control Panel under Windows) to copy the clean data up to the cloud and then down to the other machines. As well as my calendar I've also been syncing my contact data.

This approach works quite well. My main hassle is that the Eee PC is simply too underpowered for Office 2007.

The interesting thing about MobileMe is that other than push email to the iPhone and iPod touch there's not much it does that you can get for free from other sources. Online calendar and contact syncing is easy with Google Calendar and their free sync tools. The online disk storage is available from other sources as well. Mac users will opine that the operating system integration of MobileMe is a huge value add but I'm still not sure that $100AU per year is good value for something I can get for free.