Apple made it’s biggest blunder to date with the switch to their MobileMe, launching it on the same day as the iPhone 3G. Biggest blunder if you don’t look back 20 years. Syncing issues, server hiccups, and for some folks DAYS without e-mail. It all boiled down to the service not being ready for Prime-time. Which for Apple (and we here at The Church) is an abomination. Blasphemy!!

How could this happen? How could The Holy One lose it’s ironclad integrity, and so quickly? The answer will only be known in due time. Unfortunately, Apple Inc. has been mum up to a certain point. They did acknowledge that the launch of MobileMe was rocky. But after that, I’m not sure what people did to get by. Did I say days? Some waited the full two weeks. It seems to be working now, but I’m afraid for some people it’s too little too late.

Me? I was so busy those two weeks playing all the cool games and setting up apps to even notice anything was wrong. Then again, I never relied on my .Mac account for anything, really. Maybe I’m naive (hardly) but I would never rely on a web app without a secondary fallback. Since about 10 days ago, I’ve been lucky. I started receiving all of my e-mail from MobileMe. I had no pain, just shear gain.

Hey! Does that mean Apple follows me and knows what a fan-boi I am? Did they purposely make it so my experience was heaven sent? I mean, that’d be smart. I have been waiting over a year for this moment. Would have sucked if I had the world’s worst iPhone-MobileMe experience. Maybe I have an Apple angel! Sweet!

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I have been incredibly busy with my day job in the past 17 days, so please forgive as I catch up on my posting routine.

I was among a small few on July 11th, at my iPhone camp-out spot here in Portland, Oregon. Thankfully, I was 2nd in line at 2 am that. Friday morning.

When the door finally opened, I was met with a big crowd of AT&T staff. Patiently I waited as the stock guy to go retrieve my 16GB slab of fan-boi sweetness. Mind you, I’ve never owned an iPhone yet, so it was even that much sweeter. I waited painfully for a full year for this day.

Of course you know by now that the iTunes servers began to choke, and I was told to go home and sync it myself. No worries here- I FINALLY had my object of lust, desire, passion, and religious idol.
I went home, it repeatedly didn’t sync. I took a nap for an hour, and woke up to my partner beaming, saying, “Good news!! It went through!!” Giddy-Up! (as a colleague, Von Glitchka has coined the glee.)

The rest has been a love affair that

won’t ever wane. You see, I had planned this event like a set of parents who are expecting a new bundle of joy. My birthday was July 1st, I had the forethought to ask for (and received) iTunes gift cards as presents, all $75 worth. I spent most of it on games and productivity apps. the day before – so it was all ready to sync and load.

Now, I have had to put a barrier between me a the app and iTunes store, available to me in an instant. My new rule is to buy myself iTunes gift-cards twice a month. No in-store credit? I don’t get to buy. You have to. Otherwise, it could be like a bad crack habit -”I want more!!!” That my friends is a fine spot to be in – I could be one of the thousands of people, trying to hunt an iPhone down and be horribly iPhone-less right now.

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The media in general is odd – but the online Apple media can be bonkers especially so. A few weeks ago, there was a report that only 9% of Japan was interested in the iPhone 3G. Trouble was, the survey had a few holes in it. But did that stop anyone? On no.

It should have been passed up as just another survey. Why? 409 Japanese were surveyed. Yes, 409 out of 127 million will tell you all about the entire population! Crazy huh? The kicker was, the survey was taken before the iPhone 3G was announced, before the WWDC 2008 keynote, and the demographic was 20-49 year old internet users. I won’t name the culprits in question, they know who they are. I guess with everyone scrambling for anything iPhone 3G, you can grasp at just about anything for news.

Now, there is a real survey that says much more, and this time we can actually see that it was done appropriately. Now we know that 57% of those surveyed were most interested in the iPhone 3G. The Crackberry didn’t fair so well, along with Windows Mobile devices – holding at 8.8% at the bottom of the charts.

One will never know until July 11th, just 3 days away. Then all surveys will be useless.

Church of The Apple Mind, iPhone 3G | Comments