At the end of every month we take a look at all of the data from the MoFuse Network (I personally am constantly looking at it). From that data we create internal reports for our own use.

I just thought I’d share some of this information with you, so I made a nice little pie chart from some of that data. Here you have the breakdown of the top 10 mobile device manufacturers that have accessed the mobile web from the United States in August 2008.

With all of the iPhone hype and those bloated numbers I constantly read, Apple, with 3 mobile devices now, is still 3rd in the US, albeit a close 3rd.

Just to clarify, this chart was created using only data collected from the MoFuse network.

click to expand

I had a good, long, thoughtful post about my problems with the iPhone 3g. I took me a long time to write and I was excited about getting it all off of my chest.

And then disaster struck. I accidentally hit the back button on my mouse (why the hell is there a back & forward button on the mouse anyway??) and it was completely lost.

I knew there was an important feature I wanted to integrate into my custom blog software. Automatic saving of the post ever X minutes much like WordPress.

I am a relatively new Apple customer. It all started in early 2007 when I purchased a white 13.3″ MacBook.

It was more of a novelty as I had no prior experience with a Mac. I never really used it, not because of OS X but because my desktop setup was just too good. All that monitor space, no need for a laptop. This is still the case today although I am beggining to bring it into work and use it a little more often.

My Apple purchase continued in late 2007 when I bought the iPhone. Loved it. I had some problems with it though.

Some of my previous posts have talked about my on-going problems with the iPhone. My first one couldn’t hold a charge, my second one dropped calls like crazy and my third one I cracked the screen. Each and every time I brought the phone into the Apple store in Providence it was replaced on the spot, no questions asked. Yes, even when I cracked the screen!

Now, back to my MacBook. I bought it in early 2007 and it hasn’t gotten much usage, except for when I travel and it is out of warranty with no Apple Care.

I recently decided to use Boot Camp and install Vista on a partition (I know….). Well, the 60GB default harddrive just isn’t enough so I bought a much bigger drive from NewEgg.com and it arrived earlier this week.

I pop in my Leopard DVD to install it and what do you know? The DVD drive doesn’t work! Well, that sucked. Had this been a desktop I could have easily bought a new drive cheaply and installed it in 5 minutes, not the case here with my MacBook.

I brought it to the Genius bar at the Apple store and they explained to me it would cost around $250, a bit much and at this point I was just going to junk the MacBook and get a new one. I thought better of it and called 1-800-MY-APPLE and asked to speak to a supervisor.

I explained to him (Jason) that I’ve probably used the DVD drive 10 times since I purchased it and it was working fine the last time I used it, yadda yadda yadda. Sure enough, with almost no questions asked, Jason tells me he’ll place an out-of-warranty exception on the DVD drive.

There you have it. Once again Apple’s customer support has gone above and beyond for me. A brand new DVD drive was installed in my MacBook about an hour later!

I am going to make a post in the near future about the downsides I see in Apple, such as iPhone 2.0/3G, but customer support is not one of them.

So I purchased MobileMe when I purchased the iPhone 3G. I was excited that I could finally get push email, contacts and calendar on my phone without the hassle of Microsoft Exchange.

This was actually the one thing that kept me up at night in anticipation for the new iPhone, it wasn’t the 3G, the GPS or the App Store. Nope, just MobileMe. It hasn’t lived up to my expectations, not even close.

Email that is received is almost never instantly pushed. I see the email in the box and then 10 minutes (today is more like an hour) later I see it on my iPhone. Not cool.

Calendar push never works without a fight, never.

MobileMe Gallery isn’t that great. I’ve created albums and they don’t showup on my iPhone when I try to sync a picture to MobileMe Gallery. Which, by the way, all it does is email the picture and since my iPhone doesn’t appear to support different albums you can just use Tumblr for the same thing.

Contacts seems to work fine, although I don’t do much changing to them on a daily basis so I can’t tell you either way definitively.

I have 2 Vista machines and 1 MacBook. I receive error dialogs all the time on my Vista machines from MobileMe. Either MobileMe is down, your MobileMe login is incorrect, or Another computer is syncing at the same time. 1 hour does not pass without one of these error dialogs popping up requiring me to click OK.

Apple needs to fix these problems and fast. The 30 day (or is it 60?) trial is going to come quick and I suspect if these issues still loom many users will be canceling their account. I am one of those users.

This is inspired by what AdMob has done with their live ad-demand monitoring.

So I created a neat lil app that shows us(MoFuse) live traffic from across the globe hitting MoFuse servers.

This is just a glimpse of it, it’s not public, and it’s not 100% accurate as to the location but it does a decent job. There might be some privacy concerns if we release it to the public, if viewers could see live traffic to sites not their own. So for now all you’re getting is this short screencast of it in action.

This is going on a large flat-panel display mounted on the wall at the MoFuse offices, pretty good eye-candy.

Click here to see the MoFuse Live Global Mobile Traffic Monitor screencast.