Apple Updates MobileMe

Apple has quietly been updating its wireless syncing service.

The company published a support document Wednesday detailing the improvements that have been made to MobileMe since late September. Apple said it would continue to work on improving the service.

"Since MobileMe is primarily a server-side, or 'cloud'-based, service, the MobileMe team can make improvements and push updates to MobileMe without any action being required of MobileMe customers," the document said. "Since server-side updates are a bit more innocuous than a standard software update to Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows, it's easy not to notice that updates are occurring. Usually the only hint of these updates is that things just 'work better.'"

The long list of updates includes improvements to MobileMe mail, accounts, calendars, contacts, and the gallery. Apple said performance in Internet Explorer has been improved, and users have also re-gained the ability to export vCards from MobileMe contacts.

The MobileMe service was introduced in July and is the company's replacement for the .Mac service. It's often described as "Exchange for the rest of us," and is meant to offer nearly instant syncing of data between iPhones, home computers, and MobileMe's servers.

It works with the iPhone's calendar, contacts, and mail applications in addition to working with Mail, iCal, and Address Book on the Macintosh, as well as Outlook on Windows. The subscription-based service costs $99 a year, and includes 20 GB of storage space that customers can use to wirelessly store photos, videos, and other data.

MobileMe was plagued with technical issues during its rollout. The company gave customers 60 days of free service to compensate, and Apple's CEO Steve Jobs eventually admitted that the service was probably launched too early.