If you’re experiencing sync issues with MobileMe – the fix at the bottom of this post may help. It goes without saying that if you decide to try the below, you do so at your own risk so ensure you have an up to date backup – our men’s shirt guarantee doesn’t extend to technical support!

The situation I had was that syncing had just stopped, new contacts and calendar entries were not syncing. I tried the obvious solution, which is to connect your iPhone to your computer and sync manually via iTunes. I did this (under Info, check Contacts and Calendar boxes, and click on Apply) but the problem is that this doesn’t work because you will duplicate all the Contacts on your iPhone because the iPhone and computer will sync BOTH through MobileMe and manually.

So not to be deterred the next option I tried was to first switch off MobileMe syncing on both iPhone AND computer. Then sync manually from computer to iPhone via iTunes. This will replace what is on your iPhone with what is in Address Book on your computer. Do NOT check the Contacts box at the bottom of the page, or you will sync Contacts from your iPhone to your computer (unless this is what you want to do). Still no joy, the existing duplicate contacts and calendar entries were just adding to each other – at one point I ended up with six duplicates of contacts and calendar entries.

Finally, I tried forcing the data by manually deleting the duplicates from the iPhone (so at least I had one clean copy of the data) and then deleting the contacts file on BOTH the computer and on MobileMe. With MobileMe syncing switched off, a manual sync via iTunes should replace the data and all would be well. Well kind of. The data synced correctly from the iPhone to the computer but would it sync to MobileMe once I switched it back on? No it would not.

In the end I went to the Genius bar in the London Apple store. The Genius told me the problem probably lay in my MobileMe account and I would have to contact MobileMe support. This is easier than it sounds. Go to www.apple.com and navigate to MobileMe support. There you can have a real-time chat with a MobileMe support technician.

I held a two hour chat with Jorge in Austin, Texas. He checked every possible problem — too complicated to go through here, but he eliminated all possible reasons. He said he could not take things further, and would refer the problem up to a senior technician.

Within an hour I received an email from Katie, again in Texas. She gave me a new password for MobileMe, and told me to change my password in MobileMe and log in again. She then asked me for permission to look into my account, which I readily gave.

48 hours later everything was working fine. Katie said the problem was possibly caused by the latest 3.1.3 iPhone software update which created communications issues between the MobileMe servers and my iPhone. She gave me a fix in case the problem happens again:

1) Go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars on your iPhone and tap on your MobileMe account.
2) Ensure the Calendar and Contacts sliders are set to ON
3) Go back to the Mail, Contacts, Calendars screen
4) Tap Fetch New Data > Advanced
5) Change the sync for the MobileMe account with the Contacts/Calendars label from Push to Manual
6) Go to the Home screen and tap on Calendars/Contacts to see if your data syncs over to the iPhone.

Changing the MobileMe Contacts/Calendars to Manual forces the MobileMe data to sync over to your iPhone. Once the data is on the iPhone, you can go back to Fetch New Data > Advanced and change the MobileMe Contacts/Calendars back to Push. This will allow any future changes to sync properly for you as well.

So thank you Katie. All fine. MobileMe is wonderful (as long as it doesn’t throw a wobbly!).

If you’re not keen on paying Apple for the syncing privilege, then Google offer a free service (Google Sync), which works very well – just not sure what level of support you’d receive in a similar situation to mine.