How iPad could Save Apple's MobileMe

Since its launch, MobileMe has suffered from unreliability (the service has been unavailable or partially down a lot), clunkiness and inability to do what it promised much of the time: provide seemless "push" of calendaring, email and contacts over the air from the web to handheld devices.

To be fair, Apple has made improvements since the service went live in 2008 -- improvements in uptime and improvements in functionality. It offers remote location and remote wipe of lost iPhones, and it has done an outstanding job of improving its iDrive online storage and integrating it with iPhone and iPod Touch platforms.

But perhaps the biggest improvement Apple can make to MobileMe will have nothing to do with the software itself, but with the April 3 launch of its iPad -- a product that should make MobileMe easier to navigate, easier to manage and more valuable to use.

The calendaring feature that Apple has demonstrated on iPad is a case in point. On the iPhone or on a web page, MobileMe calendaring options make it tough to want to migrate to it from Google calendaring or Outlook. It's a "me-too" application. On the iPhone, you can't tilt the calendar to "landscape" presentation and you can't flip through pages like a real calendar book. iPad changes that, and offers just enough graphical-user interface improvements to turn it from "me too" to "oh, yeah."

MobileMe's iDisk suddenly becomes a lot more useful, too. Apple provides 20 GB of storage with MobileMe accounts. When it first launched, iDisk was cloud-based storage only accessible from a PC or Mac. Apple has added an iDisk app for iPhone, but what good is the ability to access that monster spreadsheet on your iPhone if you have to squint to look at it? iPad will, if all goes according to plan, provide useful access to that cloud-based data. So for someone who buys, say, a 32 GB iPad, you can have access to another 20 GB via MobileMe.

iDisk is now the real thing. It's easy and it works, and its interface is built around the concept of touch computing - - making it unique among offerings now provided by rivals like Microsoft, Google and others. On iPad, it could prove to be a game-changer.

And, importantly, Apple now offers free, 60-day trials for MobileMe. When it first launched, it cost $99 for a year, upfront, with no trials available. At no cost for two months, it's almost a no-brainer for the iPad.