The Promise and Peril of MobileMe

Anyone tried MobileMe? Last night, I signed up for the free trial, got it syncing between my laptop and iPhone, and was incredibly impressed by how well and quickly it worked. An appointment added on one nearly instantly showed up on the other -- so much better than having to fire up iTunes to have my schedule in sync. The power of the cloud! Or whatever. You know, useful.

Then, today as I was running late for a meeting, I opened the phone app and saw "No Contacts." Uh, what? All of my contacts had been deleted from the phone. They were still on me.com and on my laptop, but what I had with me was a phone with no contacts...not useful.

I fired up the support chat window on me.com and went through a half-hour session of trying to get things working. At the end of that I gave up and am deleting my account, and hoping a manual sync (you know, with a cable and stuff) will restore my contacts.

Any similar experiences, or better? MobileMe seems like such a great idea, and one with such promise. Having it fail so completely on the very first day seems like such a miserable outcome. You can't help but be impressed with the parts that work; it is incredible engineering and design all around. That's no comfort when your data disappears, though. I'd love to hear what others have experienced; hopefully I'm an outlier. (For the record, I do have over 2,200 contacts, which I guess is a lot compared to other iPhone owners I know.)