A friend of mine lost his iPad 2 last weekend. He made calls to Apple, his carrier and even the police in hope of ever seeing it again.

All sorts of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) have been thrown up around the iCloud announcement. While some of it seems unfounded, I’m still left with some concerns.

An iPhone 3G owner who was in Chicago to attend a convention used Apple's new "Find My iPhone" location service to pinpoint, then confront, the thief who made off with his phone.

Even though Apple recently upgraded the back-end infrastructure of its problem-plagued MobileMe, the online service was offline for nearly six hours Monday, according to a Web uptime measurement company.

Users of Apple's MobileMe have already discovered that the US$99-per-year service is sometimes slow and unreliable, and they're now talking about another shortcoming that was intentional.

MobileMe has always seemed like a hard sell in the consumer market.

Remember the early days of PDAs? They revolutionized the concept of a planner by combining calendars, contacts and notes into a compact, easy-to-carry device that could be connected to and synced with your computer.