First Look: MobileMe Mail beta

For many of us, e-mail is the most prominent facet of our Internet lives. As such, how we interact with our e-mail is important: it can mean saving us valuable time—and that time adds up. Apple announced last week that it’s revamping its MobileMe Webmail interface and letting subscribers test out the new version. Now that it’s been unleashed upon users, we can get a better look at what Apple’s added.

Overall, the beta version clearly signifies a major shift in design: instead of an interface based on Apple’s Mail client for Mac OS X we get one that’s styled after the iPhone and iPad Mail apps. For example, the new menu-bar buttons, which were previously little capsules that evoked the desktop client, now use the same simple icons as the iPad version of Mail.

MobileMe so often seems like one of Apple’s forgotten products that any movement or improvement is welcome. On the whole, the beta version of the Webmail client is promising, and—if nothing else—makes us eagerly anticipate similar enhancements to the rest of the MobileMe Web tools.