At the 2008 Worldwide Developers Conference today in San Francisco, Apple's boss Steve Jobs talked about the company's MobileMe service which is allegedly "Exchange for the rest of us," providing advanced synchronization features with support for Mail, iCal and Address Book on Mac OS X and Outlook on Windows.

The price is somewhat steep, in line with the previous charges for the .Mac service it replaces: 20GB of storage for $99 per year with a 60-day free trial. An additional 20GB of storage can be purchased for $49 a year, 40GB more for $99. A Family Pack will cost $149 (cheaper than the .Mac version) and will include one master account with 20GB of storage and four Family Member accounts with 5GB of storage each

Apple has made sure that the transition from its older .Mac to MobileMe will be as smoothly as possible. User accounts will be transferred to me.com automatically, although the old mac.com gateway will remain online and the user@mac.com email addresses will still work.

The inclusion of PCs in its web services is a big step forward for Apple. Outlook support means that the battle is on with Google's and Microsoft's competing products. Apple also implemented the real-time, Over the Air (OTA) iPhone syncing in MobileMe, a long-requested feature. Of course, iPhone firmware 2.0 is needed for the capabilities to be available.

Apparently, Apple's brand new web service was built using SproutCore, a new JavaScript framework developed by Sproutit, according to a report by ZDNET.