MobileMe users get 60 more days of free service

Apple admits that the rocky MobileMe launch "has not been our finest hour," and pledges that it'll make "many more" improvements to the buggy, $99-a-year service. Let's hope so.

Apple notified MobileMe subscribers of the latest rebate via e-mail Monday night. In the e-mail, the "MobileMe team" wrote:

We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users' patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60-day extension. This is in addition to the one month extension most subscribers have already received. We are working very hard to make MobileMe a great service we can all be proud of. We know that MobileMe's launch has not been our finest hour, and we truly appreciate your patience as we turn this around.

The latest rebate comes on top of an initial 30-day extension, which Apple granted in the immediate aftermath of MobileMe's bumpy (to put it mildly) launch.

The relaunch of the old .Mac service was pretty much a debacle from the word go. Apple initially indicated that the MobileMe rollout would only take hours; instead, it took days for the service to get anywhere near stable, with users enduring laggy Me.com performance and spotty syncing for weeks after the July 11 launch.

A small portion of users were locked out of their Me.com e-mail accounts for more than a week, while some trial subscribers in Europe got additional extensions after their credit cards got hit with inflated authorization charges.

Earlier this month, Steve Jobs admitted that the MobileMe launch could—and should—have been delayed, and launched in phases rather than all at once.

MobileMe appears to be working normally now, although some users are still running into syncing problems, while others are discovering the myriad limitations of the service—for instance, the fact that iCal calendar "subscriptions" (such as birthdays and U.S. holidays) can't be synced to an iPhone, and that iPhones can't access MobileMe e-mail aliases.

So, what do you think—has Apple gone far enough to compensate its long-suffering MobileMe subscribers? Anyone still running into MobileMe trouble?