This announcement from Telstra confuses me: We can already access email on pretty much any mobile phone these days, and I can't picture most people wanting to check their SMS messages on their PC. So what's the deal?

MyConnect is made up of three different parts: My Inbox, which is an online message, contact and calendar management service for all your various messages like email, sms, voicemail etc and is free; My Email which lets you access up to five different email accounts on your mobile for $7 a month (hang on, doesn't the HTC Touch Diamond do that for free?) and MySync, which for $3 a month will backup all your contacts and calendars and synchronise it with MyInbox.

So essentially it's like a MobileMe for Telstra customers. And it costs about the same too - for all the features you're looking at $120 a year.

Aside from the obvious bitching about price, is this something any of you guys would be interested in? Or are there other, better solutions you'd prefer?

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Apple's tacking on an addition 60 days to the 30 days it already doled out to MobileMe subscribers, which means you've got an entire three months extra to wait out the issues you've been having. Apple sent out these emails today to MobileMe subscribers, but if you're one of the ones with MobileMe mail snags, you might not have gotten it. Well you've seen it now! Apple has some more clarifications in case you're not sure if you qualify. [Apple]

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David Walsh, a network engineer who worked at Apple from 1995 to 2007, is currently suing them for making him work a little too hard. Specifically, he says they made him work more than 40 hours a week without overtime (because he was a "senior" engineer, a pseudo-management position he says was created to skirt paying overtime) and required him to be on call for seven days straight every six weeks. In other words, a pretty standard schedule in the Valley. Besides, if anything, MobileMe's launch made it clear Apple's network engineers should be working more, not less. I keeeeeed. Kind of. [Macworld via Valleywag]

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When we brought you news of Steve Jobs' displeasure at the stumbling launch of MobileMe, we wondered what was happening in the management structure of the service. The chaps at Valleywag have worked it out, and it's a classic. The guy now in charge of MobileMe, and all of Apple's online services—Eddy Cue—was actually originally in charge of the iTunes Store: the place where service outages really messed up the iPhone 3G's launch. Remember the iPocalypse? Hmmm. That now makes us wonder what happened to Cue's former boss Sina Tamaddon (on the right in the pic) and Rob Schoeben, who was in charge of MobileMe's launch. Did they too get punishment promotions? [Valleywag]

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The MobileMe launch was a massive flusteruck--even Steve said so. Our long national nightmare is over though, right? Well, Om is reporting that their whole net infrastructure is a few years behind where it should be, and if it's as bad as he's heard, "then there is no way Apple can get over its current spate of problems."

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Ars has decided to the release the full email Steve Jobs sent to Apple employees declaring that "MobileMe was simply not up to Apple's standards." There's actually not much you haven't already read, other than the additional admonishment that it "was not our finest hour." Granted, that probably means at least 20 more people were flayed than we originally believed. Here's the whole thing:

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We all know that Apple's MobileMe had a difficult birth: but it's quite another thing to be able to read the criticisms of the service from his Steveness himself. And over at Ars Technica they've got hold of an internal Apple email that Steve Jobs sent out to Apple employees detailing his displeasure that MobileMe was "not up to Apple's Standards." It needed both more time in testing, and a piece-by-piece launch, rather than attempting to launch it as a "monolithic service," he thinks.

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As of yesterday evening, Apple claims the bugs that have plagued the service since its launch have been worked out, including restoring the mail accounts of users that were locked out for nearly two weeks and resolving a new bug that caused devices to drop calendar and contact data when syncing wirelessly. With those issues behind them Apple has resolved to switch gears and focus on improving other areas of the service. Appleinsider forum members are still reporting problems though, so this resolution may still be a little premature. [MobileMe Status via Appleinsider]

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Mossberg has rolled out an in-depth review of MobileMe backed by a week of testing in today's WSJ, and if you've been following our coverage it won't come as too big of a surprise that he's not a fan. But his problems with the service go well beyond the launch hiccups you've read about. So what's got Mossberg so riled up that he's thrown down his big badhammer on MobileMe?

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Remember when Apple got shady with Windows users by pushing out Safari via its own software update tool to everyone, even if you didn't have it installed already? Windows users are now up in arms again about iTunes 7.7 bringing along an unwanted MobileMe control panel without asking, and I don't blame them. Granted, a control panel is not the same as an entire application, but getting loaded up with extra software that you don't want is still a shady move. And unfortunately, that's just the start of MobileMe's pushiness.

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