Well, not really. During the entire time I have run thecheapgeek.org,
I have done several videos detailing how to replace several of
MobileMe's features with free alternatives. In fact, this attempt to
save myself and my readers the 99$ a year asking price was what
inspired the name of my site, and eventually my consulting company.

What services does MobileMe offer?

Web based Email, Calendar, and Contacts
Push syncing of Mail, Calendar, and Contacts to Macs, PCs, and iOS devices
Photo sharing and web galleries
Find my iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad
20 gb of cloud storage
Limited iWeb hosting
So how can you replicate these services for free? Follow the jump to find out.

Web based Email, Calendar, and Contacts

This is the easiest of all the services to replace. There are numerous
free web based services that can replicate what MobileMe offers, but
my personal favorite and my current provider is provided by Google. I
use Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts and they all
have great web interfaces, albeit not as well designed as Apples
offerings.

Push Syncing

This is the main reason not to choose a provider other than Google.
Yahoo does offer push Email but lacks push for Calendar and Contacts.
Microsoft is about to roll out active sync for their Hotmail service,
providing similar functionality to the syncing services offered by
Apple and Google. Google, and eventually Microsoft, will use
Microsoft's own Exchange active sync to push Email messages, Calendar
entries, and new Contacts directly to your mobile device. One big
advantage to active sync is that device types other than iOS devices
are supported. Get instructions on how to set up Google sync for
iPhone here.

Mail syncing with the desktop machine has always been easy via Apples
Mail, Microsofts outlook, or many other great email clients. Contact
syncing is complicated an only support on the most current version of
OS X. Calendar syncing is well supported but is different depending
on the platform you operate on. If you have 10.5.x (i.e. Leopard) on
your Mac or are running a PC watch the following video to set up
Calendar syncing.

If you are running 10.6.x (i.e. Snow Leopard) on your Mac watch this
video to set up calendar syncing. Follow a similar procedure for
setting up contact syncing with the address book.

Photo/Video Sharing

Mobile Me gives users the power to easily upload and display their
photographs/videos in rich web galleries. Additionally many Apple
desktop applications such as iPhoto, iMovie, and Aperture offer one
click uploading to Mobile Me. Google Picasa offers a free way to
upload photos to the cloud and has a companion desktop application.
Flickr also offers free photo and video sharing and is integrated into
iPhoto and Aperture. Both of these services also offer a premium
component giving you more storage and the ability to upload as many
pictures as you would like

Personally I use Dropbox.
Dropbox creates attractive web galleries with any pictures or videos
you upload. It also fully integrates with any operating system, but we
will get to Dropbox a little later in the post. Download and install
Picasa or try out Flickr.

Find my iPhone

This is one area that cannot be replicated by a free service. Mobile
Me offers the ability to locate any iOS device from any web browser or
an iOS device. The service also allows you to remotely wipe the
device, push messages to the screen, and play an audible tone even if
the phone is on silent. This is a great component of Mobile Me,
however alone, I don’t feel that it is worth 100$ a year.

Cloud Storage

Included with Mobile Me is Apples iDisk. This is a 20 Gb block of
storage can be used for any files you would like to store in the
cloud. The drive will mount as a hard drive on your machine and has a
free iOS application to access your data from anywhere. Dropbox can
replace all of these features and performs better with your desktop
operating system and has mobile applications for iOS, Android, and
BlackBerry. With a free account you get access to 2GB of storage with the ability to refer
other users to the service and get 250mb of extra storage as a reward.
I accumulated close to 5gb of storage by referring friends and many
of my readers. In the video below I demonstrate how to install and get
started with dropbox and show you some of the cool things it can do.

Wrap Up

To sum up, Mobile Me can easily be replaced in just about every facet,
at no cost to you. So you might be asking yourself “Why does anyone
pay for Mobile Me if all of these services are freely available?”
Mobile Me is simple to set up and even easier to use, but that
simplicity comes at a cost. In my opinion, I am happy to do a little
work and manage many different accounts in order to save 100$ a year
and use services with more cross platform support.