I was willing to give it one last shot. If Apple had used the MacWorld conference to announce a super-cool feature for MobileMe, their cloud computing service, I probably would have renewed my subscription.

But Apple didn't -- my colleague Dan Lyons's review of the show is a must-read -- and I'm going to let MobileMe lapse in four days. The sad thing is, the only reason I'm able to make this decision now, and not when my subscription was originally due to expire in October, is that service had been so poor Apple gave me an extra three months for free.

In effect, it's only been a stay of execution. And after ticking through MobileMe's features, the decision about what to do with my $99 is that much easier.

Mail. Never used it. Apple's mail service lacks many of Gmail's features and offers, as best I can tell, no new ones.

Contacts. Over-the-air syncing with my iPhone would be nice, but if it's not push technology, it's not worth it. I'll sync with a cable, through iTunes.

Calendar. Here's a feature someone else might decide they can't live without: appointments made on your computer will magically appear on your iPhone. from work. But in my experiments, this performs fitfully. And again, because MobileMe has never offered true push syncing, I just don't have faith that I'm working with the absolute most current version of my data. Instead I use my never-let-me-down-a-single-time BlackBerry.

Gallery. This is the reason I signed up for MobileMe in the first place: a gorgeous way to share your photos online. I posted several galleries of a 2007 vacation to Namibia (check them out here, for the next four days at least) -- and while everything worked, and worked well, I've seen equally impressive free services elsewhere, like SmugMug.

iDisk. It just doesn't work. Uploads and downloads on my MacBook Pro are slow, drop for no reason, and the status information given is often wildly misleading. I'll test out some other online storage options (I'm already using Mozy for backup), but in the future, I expect to need this service less and less. A lot of my documents are stored in the Google Docs cloud, and most other files I can send to myself for free on Gmail.

There are assorted other features, but they don't add up to a $99 value, and certainly not if Apple experiences more of the downtime that plagued MobileMe's rollout last summer.