One of the latest shoes to drop, however, is the apparent lack of support for syncing with Microsoft Outlook calendars that are hosted on Exchange servers. A big part of the MobileMe vision was that you could install some software on your Windows-based PC, and sync your Outlook calendars with the same cloud of data that all of your other devices (such as your MacBook and iPhone) were synched to. And depending on who you ask, this seems to be working if you’re operating Outlook in “stand-alone” mode (as most home users presumably do).

Those of us who are using Outlook at work, however, tend to have Outlook hooked up to an Exchange server, so that we can share calendars and contacts and what-not with our co-workers. I (and apparently many others) have been struggling with this configuration, trying to get it to work. For me particularly, it’s the calendars that just don’t seem to sync at all. I have a default calendar (named “Calendar”) in Outlook, and that’s the one that all of my work events get scheduled on. I couldn’t figure out how to sync this one to Mobile Me at all. The additional calendars that I’ve created seemed to sync properly at first, but now it seems that events that I add to those calendars in Outlook never get pushed up to the MobileMe server (and thus they never appear on any of my other copies of those calendars).

Given all of the other MobileMe snafus that people have been dealing with since the launch, it was easy for me to assume that this was just another thing that Apple didn’t quite have working right, which would be repaired in short-ish order. More recent posts on Apple’s support forums suggest, however, that not only is this not going to be fixed, but that it’s this way by design.

Apple has already had to issue one major mea culpa regarding their false advertising of push capability for the desktop clients of MobileMe. As more people become aware of the “resolution” of this Exchange-synching problem, confidence in MobileMe is only going to lessen.

Come on, Google. Give us push-synching of our Google e-mail, calendars and contacts. If it works, I’ll even give you the $99 a year I might have paid Apple for MobileMe.

My first attempt was to just POP into my existing Gmail account. Technically speaking, this worked fine, but it had the undesirable effect of downloading a lot of old e-mail messages that I thought were ancient history. This wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that the iPhone Mail application doesn’t have a way to clear out all of your deleted messages. You have to go in and delete them one-by-one. Yes, seriously.

Even if I ironed out the short-term problem of downloading already-archived Gmail messages, I was worried that this wouldn’t be a workable solution moving forward. So, after doing some research here and there I decided that what I needed was an IMAP account. I’d heard of IMAP before, obviously, but for whatever reason I’ve just never used it. Luckily, my hosting provider supports both POP and IMAP accounts, so I set up one for myself and told Gmail to start forwarding all of its incoming messages to that account. And this part worked like a charm. The same sources recommended that I get my Mac Mail client talking to this IMAP account first, before trying to get it set up on the iPhone. Fair enough — how hard could that be?

Actually adding the account in Mail went pretty smoothly. I had the names of the incoming and outgoing mail servers, as well as my user name and password. When I finished adding the account, Mail verified that it could connect to the IMAP server and that went fine. I observed that it synchronized with the IMAP server and created “Drafts”, “Sent” and “Trash” mailboxes under my standard Inbox, which at the time seemed like a reasonable thing to do. I could even see that the messages that Gmail had forwarded to the IMAP account were there in my Inbox now.

The problem that I started running into was that when I tried to compose a new e-mail message in Mail, and save a draft of it, Mail would pop up a dialog box with a cryptic error message: “The message could not be saved”. No indication why it couldn’t be saved, or what I could do to correct that problem. I also discovered soon after that I couldn’t send e-mail messages. When I tried to send messages, I didn’t even get an error dialog; the messages just disappeared into the ether.

So I started doing some more research online, and quickly discovered that I wasn’t the first person to run into this problem. The general consensus was that Mail’s support for IMAP is a little flaky, but several people offered their solutions and workarounds. One of the necessary steps is to tell Mail that the IMAP path prefix is “INBOX”; the other necessary step is to set up a mapping between the remote “Drafts”, “Sent” and “Trash” folders to the same folders in Mail.

The part that I got wrong was the order of these two steps, and to make a long story short, it apparently matters. If you define the IMAP path prefix first, it doesn’t seem to work properly. In my case, the “Drafts” folder would just disappear altogether with no way to get back to it. So wait to do that after you’ve set up the mappings. It took me most of the day to get this working, but it does seem to be OK now.

Signing up for the iPhone is like being tossed into a menage a trois with Angelina and Rosie O’Donnell. You want the beauty, you have to sleep with the beast.

“If you can’t afford the phone, don’t buy it. If you like your current phone better, do not buy the iPhone. Why are you making this so hard on yourself? It could be worse. You could be in Darfur. iPhones aren’t even available there.”

Apologies in advance for not providing attributions for these reports — if you’re one of the people who pointed one of these problems, you know who you are.

System-Wide Problems

• By design, there’s no visible file system for the iPhone. This has a lot of ramifications in terms of limitations on other features.
• There’s no support for copy-and-paste between applications.
• Landscape orientation for the onscreen keyboard is only available in Safari. For other applications (namely, Mail) it’s always in portrait orientation.
• You can’t purchase music or videos from the iTunes store, directly from your iPhone. You must purchase them via the desktop application and then sync them to the iPhone.
• The built-in Google Maps application doesn’t know where you are, even though one of the commercials suggested that. There’s no built-in GPS, so it can’t know where you are. You can, however, bookmark certain locations (such as your home or office) to use as starting points for directions.
• You can’t sync via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi; you must use the standard USB cable.
• No support for MMS messaging (only SMS).
• No iChat application.
• You can’t compose notes on the desktop and then sync them to iPhone; you must compose notes directly on the iPhone.
• You can’t record video with the iPhone’s built-in camera; it’s only good for still photos.

Problems with Mail

• There’s no Junk mail filter built-in to the Mail application. This is not a big deal for me as Gmail does a pretty thorough job of spam-filtering on the server side, but it is nevertheless a curious omission.
• You can’t attach a picture to an e-mail message from within the Mail application; you must switch over to the Photo album, select a picture and click the “Send” (or is it “Share”?) button. This presumably also means that you can’t send multiple pictures in the same e-mail message.
• There’s no way to reply to an e-mail without quoting some part of that message. You can’t, for example, select the relevant part of the original message and then click “Reply” like you can in the desktop Mail.app.

Problems with Safari

• The browser doesn’t yet support Flash, so web sites that rely heavily on that technology (such as Homestar Runner) won’t work.
• Safari doesn’t cache pages that you’ve recently visited. If you navigate away from a page and then click the “Back” button, Safari reloads that page.
• You can’t download arbitrary files from web sites and sync them to your desktop for later use.

One of the primary things I like about Pages is a feature that it didn’t borrow from Word: the disappearing frames trick. For whatever reason — and I admit that it’s probably something I don’t understand about Word’s workings — text boxes and images will often hop around, or just disappear, if I insert (or delete) text from a page. I’ve tried different approaches to make a text frame “stick” to the spot where I place it on a page, but nothing seems to work. This makes for a very fragile editing experience, and Pages doesn’t suffer from this at all.

Some problems I’ve run into:

1. There doesn’t seem to be a way to specify different formatting for left and right pages’ headers and footers. More specifically, I’d like the page number to appear flush left on the left pages, and flush right on the right pages. 
2. There has to be at least some text content on a page, or Pages will try to get rid of it. In other words, if all of the content on a page consists of text boxes, images, etc. you’ll need to add some invisible dummy text (like a carriage return, or some spaces) somewhere on the page to make it “stick”.
3. When I insert a new text box, Pages always seems to place it in some awkward place, disrupting the text around it in the process. I still haven’t figured out the scheme it’s using for the initial text box position.
4. A minor thing, but there’s no easy way to create drop caps as you can in Word. The solution in Pages involves creating a text box and then fiddling with its size to make it look right.