Hello all, me again, this time I’d like to run through some nifty tools I’ve discovered since owning an iPhone that have proven useful to get all of the features MobileMe offer, but for free!

Gmail

It’s not the best mail service in the world, or the most popular, but it’s certainly the most useful for use with the iPhone. Gmail offers an exchange service using ActiveSync; this means that your contacts, email, and calendar can all be sync’d over the air and backed up to Google’s server. To set this up, follow the usual instructions to add a mail account but select Microsoft Exchange and enter the following account information:

This will pull and push all of your information from the servers, constantly keeping a backup of all your information. Any change you make online is reflected on your phone, and visa versa.

Dropbox

This free service replicates the function of iDisk – it provides personal disk space in the cloud. I personally use this to sync all of my documents between my personal and work computers and has effectively replaced my USB. There is a desktop client/iPad/iPhone and the online application to access your files which even features a recovery feature should a file be accidentally deleted. You get 2GB free space when you sign up, and an extra 250MB for every friend that signs up as of your recommendation. Follow this link to get your extra space -> http://db.tt/uodMT1y

Shown above is the online client, as you can see – there are shared folders that can be sync between your friends to fileshare. The Mac OSX client will seemingly integrate into your finder like so:

It’s a great service that is a fantastic free alternative to iDisk – and the best feature? It’s quick!

Location Services

Since MobileMe FindMyiPhone is free, we’ll just use this for a free service. It integrates into your iPhone so we may as well take advantage of it since this is a post discussing the free options. If you did want to pay for something with a bit more functionality to offer security against losing your device, check out Cylay which is featured in our top 10 Cydia apps.

So there you have hit, why pay for MobileMe when you have all the alternatives for free? If you do use MobileMe, let us know what attracts you to it by leaving a comment, or drop us a line in the forums.