Live Mesh tech preview
Posted by Luca Morandi on August 8, 2008
I was aware of the Live Mesh service from Microsoft for a long time, but I never tried it. During the last few weeks, the service got a decent amount of attention from blogs like JKOnTherun and WMExperts. I kept reading about it in my feeds and it was also discussed a lot on the podcasts of the two websites mentioned earlier.
At a certain moment, I was eager to try it out. File syncing between multiple devices and five gigs of cloud-based storage sounds really good, don’t you think? Anyway, being free (at least at the moment) I went to the Mesh website on my smartphone. I had to log in with my Live Mail account, which I fortunately already have. After
logging in, I was told that I had to visit the site on my computer to set up the Live Mesh account.
Later on I indeed did this, only to discover that the beta was US-only. So nobody outside the US of A is able to taste some of the cloud goodness that Mesh offers. What a poor show. The only reason I can think of is that they simply don’t have enough capacity at the moment to support the whole world. That would be smarter then what Apple did with the App Store, 2.0 update and Mobile Me, since they weren’t able to cope with the huge demand. There you have it, I just joined the hype of kicking the dead horse that is Mobile Me…
Anyway, I just hope that this tech preview or beta will be available to the rest of us mobile geeks sooner rather than later. Although Live Mesh will probably be out of beta by that time. Can we have a basic, free service with 5 GB storage please? In that case, heavy users could opt for a paid plan with more storage and additional functionality (probably added afterwards). Because I for one am not a fan of paid subscription services (Mobile Me, I’m looking at you).
