As part of Apple’s release of and transition to their new, free iCloud service, Apple will reportedly be restoring people’s expired MobileMe accounts. A recent report indicates that 9to5Mac got ahold of an expired MobileMe account, and found that it had already been migrated to iCloud.
Currently, in order to set up the new iCloud account, you must be running an iOS 5 device, and use it to sign up for the service and get the ball rolling. Now, however, it seems as though your old MobileMe username and password will now function as your iCloud login.
One interesting side effect of this is that old MobileMe accounts that have been migrated to iCloud can no longer be used to sign in at me.com, meaning they can’t access their mail on the web any longer, and must now us a client such as Mail.app. The folks over at 9to5Mac have apparently gotten an expired MobileMe account up and running on iCloud using a Mac with OS X Lion Developer Preview and an iPhone running iOS 5.
While there has been some question regarding iCloud’s usage of mobile apps – whether they’ll use MobileMe’s web apps, or an all new set of apps, or no web apps at all, this report tends to suggest that either no web app compatibility will be present, or that web apps will be present, but they just haven’t been made available yet.
I personally find this intriguing. Anyone have an old and expired MobileMe account I can use to test this out? Sound off in the comments!