Reports of a new email phishing scam are making their rounds, this time attempting to trick MobileMe users into upgrading their account to iCloud while attempting to grab those users’ personal information such as credit card and social security numbers. The phishing email going around is as quoted:

Dear MobileMe member,

Please sign up for iCloud and click the submit botton [sic], you’ll be able to keep your old email address and move your mail, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks to the new service.

Your subscription will be automatically extended through July 31, 2012, at no additional charge. After that date, MobileMe will no longer be available.

Click here to update iCLOUD

Sincerely,

The Apple store Team

Clicking the “iCLOUD” button takes the user to a phishing page mimicking various elements of Apple’s legitimate billing and shopping cart pages (shown above). When receiving emails like these, it is always best to ensure you are actually taken to Apple’s website by checking the URL. If the URL is at all suspicious, do not enter any personal information under any circumstances or you may end up seriously regretting it.

Via [MacRumors]

Developers that are subscribed to Apple’s former MobileMe service are now able to migrate their account over to iCloud through Apple’s new portal. Doing so is a very simple step-by-step process. Users will be able to take their Mail, Contacts, and Calendar data with them so they can continue to use iWeb, iDisk, and Photo Gallery until June 30th of next year. Apple also notes, however, that Dashboard widget sync, dock item sync, keychains, signatures, mail account rules, mail preferences, and mail smart boxes are no longer available after migrating.

Some good news for MobileMe users is that upon migrating to iCloud, they will be able to keep their 20GB of annual storage space in iCloud, added to the 5GB of base storage included for everyone. Therefore, MobileMe users will start off with 25GB of storage space in iCloud rather than just 5GB like everyone else. iCloud is expected to launch publicly alongside iOS 5 and possibly the next-generation iPhone this fall.

Read [9to5 Mac]

MacRumors is reporting a MobileMe user recently received an email from Apple detailing what happens once you get close to reaching the 5GB storage limit to which everyone is entitled for free in the company’s iCloud service. Once users near their 5 GB limit, they will receive an email like the one shown above.

The email details users’ choices once they’re close to reaching their storage limit: buy more storage from Apple or free up space using the iCloud Storage & Backup settings on your iDevice and by simply deleting emails.

Should user max out their storage without purchasing more (even though Apple has not yet stated prices and available storage increments) or freeing up space, their iDevice will no longer save any data to iCloud and any emails sent to the associated email accounts will be returned to sender until the users choose either of the two options.

5GB is clearly not a great amount of storage to have if you plan on using iCloud regularly, so it would be a wise idea to buy more once Apple allows us to. However, on a positive note, any apps or media bought via iTunes will not count towards a user’s storage limit, so reaching it shouldn’t be too big of an issue for now.

Although some features of iCloud are already available to the public, the full package won’t be here until this fall alongside the release of iOS 5.

Via [MacRumors]

The new iCloud accounts no longer work on me.com, so users with their accounts migrated over to iCloud will not be able to access their email via the web any longer. All of iCloud’s offerings currently work perfectly within the native iOS apps, although not through Apple’s me.com web apps with the exception of Find My iPhone.

It is not yet known whether iCloud will support web apps like MobileMe did and how they will implement them should they choose to. No iCloud web apps have yet been discovered, although some sources claim they are currently in development. Unfortunately, we won’t know for sure until Apple gives us more details or until iCloud is fully released this fall.

Via [9to5 Mac]

As MobileMe will be undergoing its transition to Apple’s new iCloud service, many have been wondering about what will happen to MobileMe services that the company had not mentioned as part of the transition. One of these services in question is Apple’s iWeb, a part of the company’s iLife suite that integrates with MobileMe, which offers web hosting for web sites that are created with the software.

A user of both iWeb and MobileMe was concerned about the product’s fate, and decided to email Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs about it. The email he sent Jobs is as follows:

Dear Mr. Jobs,

Will I need to find an alternative website builder and someone to host my sites?

I have invested a lot of time and effort and the thought of re-training sucks more than mobileme ever did.

The user was lucky enough to receive the following one-word response from Steve, who occasionally answers emails from the general public:

Yep.

Sent from my iPhone

The email headers of the conversation between the user and Jobs have been analyzed and are believed to be legitimate, which is not very surprising, as many believed that iWeb was to suffer this fate. The software underwent its last major update in iLife ’09 and received its last minor bug fix in February, as it has continued to be a part of the iLife suite.

Via [MacRumors]

The Find My iPhone iOS app has just been given an update, adding two new features to its previous offerings. According to the release notes for the update, if the iPhone you are trying to find is offline you will now receive an email once it comes back online and is located, and you are now able to remove an offline device from the list within the app.

Although the new features aren’t exactly too exciting, they are definitely helpful for lost/stolen iPhones that have had their battery drained or have been discovered/stolen and subsequently turned off. The free update brings the app to version 1.2 and weighs in at just 5.2MB.

As Apple has introduced its iCloud service at the WWDC keynote yesterday, you may be wondering what will become of its predecessor, MobileMe. Unfortunately, Apple has decided to discontinue the $99/year service with iCloud as its replacement, according to a new support document from the company which outlines the details of how the transition over the newer service will take place.

As of June 6th, if you were a paid subscriber to MobileMe, your account has been automatically credited with extended service until June 30, 2012 for free. After that date, MobileMe will be officially discontinued as iCloud completely takes over.

Once the transition between services is complete, all of a subscriber’s emails, contacts, and calendars from MobileMe will be moved over to iCloud and they will be to keep their me.com or mac.com email addresses. However, MobileMe Family, storage upgrades, and the ability to create a new MobileMe account or begin a trial are no longer available. Those who have unused activation codes from the purchase of MobileMe, however, are able to request a refund from Apple from here until June 30th of next year.

Read [Apple support document]
Via [9to5 Mac]

Available in beta now in the U.S. only and requires iOS 4.3.1 on iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 (GSM model), iPod touch (3rd and 4th generation), iPad, or iPad 2, or a Mac or PC with iTunes 10.3.

There is no word on when 4.3 will be available for Verizon iPhones, if users will have to simply wait for the fall to get iOS 5, or even why they haven’t been updated in the first place.

Product [Apple iCloud]

Apple Computer has been working on signing deals with Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and EMI. This is one big advantage over Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Google Music, which don’t have agreements. Record companies aren’t too pleased with them, and have even called the Cloud Drive potentially illegal. Having the record companies on Apple’s side means you’re not limited to using the iCloud just as a place to store the music you already own. You could buy songs and listen to them anywhere you have an internet connection without having to download them to your device’s hard drive. In addition, you won’t even have to upload songs you have to the iCloud because it will scan your hard drive for songs you already own and give you access instantly.

Keeping your songs in the iCloud means you don’t have to decide which ones you store on your device, especially if you want to save room for video recording, taking pictures, and downloading apps. You also won’t have to keep track of what songs you have on each of your portable devices because you’ll know they’ll have access to any song you own automatically. The downside is that Apple seems likely to charge a subscription fee to access the iCloud, although there’s no information available about how much it will cost.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Apple if this was all there is to it. Patently Apple has a great description of all of the features that the iCloud will have, as well as a picture of how you could access it through iTunes. One of the best features they describe is being able to keep part of the songs on your device so that you won’t have to wait for them to download before you can start listening. How much of the song is kept on the hard drive depends on the speed of the internet connection. There are also different ways described of how Apple will prevent unauthorized people from getting access to your songs and how this won’t work with just songs but with audio books as well.

Some are speculating that this will be announced (or at the very least mentioned) at the upcoming WWDC starting on June 6th. However, I don’t think Apple will talk about anything that’s not completely ready, and won’t feel pressured to release something that isn’t as close to perfection as possible. Currently Apple is scheduled to discuss the future of the iOS and Mac OS X platforms and their closer integration in future versions. Of course, with Apple, anything is possible, and Steve Jobs loves to surprise us.

Via [CNET and DailyTech]

It’s unlikely Apple is planning to eliminate MobileMe from its offerings already, as the service is still quite new. Most are speculating Apple is going to change the way in which MobileMe is offered: as a free cloud-based “digital locker” for their customers’ data rather than the paid, tangible version that has existed until now. Of course, this is still only a rumor at the moment, although with this move—along with previous similar rumors that pointed in this direction—it is safe to say there is a good possibility that MobileMe may be going the way of the cloud.

To make things even more interesting, during its very recent annual shareholders meeting, Apple revealed that it has a huge $1 billion data center based in North Carolina that is about to be ready. This is only more evidence to suggest that they are readying MobileMe as a cloud-based service.

Still, rumors are rumors, and we’ll just have to wait and see what becomes of MobileMe.

(Former) Product [MobileMe]