The still-ongoing technical problems which affect Apple MobileMe users are once again a clear sign that the Cupertino company lacks the required expertise to develop and maintain such a service on its own. Furthermore, most analysts and MobileMe users have pointed out that Apple most probably lies about the "1 percent" of users which allegedly are plagued by problems with the service.

Apple's MobileMe service, which the company said it is "Exchange for the rest of us," is off to a rough start, with angry users on Apple's back and experts questioning the company's strategy and prowess after several days of on and off outages and lost e-mails. Apple says it has issues with its servers, which is quite appalling, especially now that days have passed and they are still not fixed.

The ongoing problems also made people wonder why Apple did not ask for help, given the high stakes of the MobileMe launch and the expensive preceding advertising campaign. Why did they not hire tech muscle to deal with the issue as fast as possible?

Meanwhile, several reviewers have blasted the service as bug-ridden, hit by abundant and frequent problems and overall unreliable. WSJ's Walter Mossberg said the service has just too many flaws to keep its promises. Apple has posted a damage control notice with the apparently false information that "1% of MobileMe members cannot access MobileMe Mail." In fact, this 1 percent seems to be much larger than the mathematical 1 percent. Maybe it's an Apple percent.

It's unclear what happened to the emails which disappeared for the moment and did not reach the Apple-powered mailboxes. The worst part is that I got no error message for the stuff that I sent to MobileMe users and didn't reach them, which means for now there is no way to know what went through and, for Apple MobileMe users, it's impossible to know how many emails they lost.

MobileMe tries to compete with similar services such as BlackBerry, but Apple has a very long way to go. I hope this redeems BlackBerry once for good as it makes clear that providing the kind of service they do, with the number of users involved and the excellent uptime, is quite awesome.