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"Apple's MobileMe is far too flawed to be reliable," the Sage of Potomac pronounced yesterday. It's a rare swipe from Walt Mossberg, the guy better known for writing Steve Jobs's marketing slogans ("the most elegant desktop computer I've ever used.") What's important is that Mossberg isn't complaining about MobileMe's launch glitches — even when it works, he says, it's not solid. Here's the bullet list of Walt's gripes:

  • Using two Macs, two Dell computers and two iPhones, I ran into problem after problem.
  • While changes made on the Web site or the iPhone are instantly pushed to the computers, changes made on computers are only synced every 15 minutes, at best.
  • The Web site was sluggish.
  • occasionally calendar entries wouldn’t load at all.
  • Sometimes, you have to manually refresh the Web pages to see changes made on your devices
  • when I tried to open my Web-based file-storage page directly from the MobileMe control panel on Windows, I got an error message on both Dells.
  • MobileMe calendar appeared as a seprate calendar in Outlook.
  • My address-book groups [showed up in Outlook] as separate address books.
  • On one occasion, my synced contacts on the iPhone appeared as names only.
  • Certain emails simply disappeared [instead of being routed by rules to different folders.]
  • Twice, MobileMe was unable to sync my bookmarks at all. When it did, their order was scrambled.
  • My custom ringtones for particular contacts were lost.