I honestly haven’t been paying that much attention. As we develop FastFigures as a web-based service rather than a native application, it has taken a lot of the pressure off when it comes to the hardware. What’s new and what’s different about the hardware gets munched down to a “what changed in the browser?” question instead.

So I wasn’t paying great attention to the iPhone announcements yesterday. But something did catch my eye: the announcement of MobileMe.

Here’s the bottom line: sort, search, modify, create and move contacts, calendars and emails and they show up on all your computers — Mac, Windows, web and iPhone — at the same time with all the same information without synchronizing anything. If you are familiar, this is what Exchange does in the enterprise. Of course, most of us aren’t in the enterprise so Exchange does us no good.

I have been dying for this solution. I love the web-based calendaring and emailing coupled with auto-sync locally. For my money, I could even care less if it shows up locally – just give me the web tools.

Apple’s price is $100 per year for a single person or $150 per year for a family of 4, basically $8 to $12 per month. It also comes with a place to store data files and photos.

There are shortcomings at this point, from what I could tell. What happened to Task syncing and notepad syncing, for instance? For that matter, what happened to tasks altogether? I still don’t see a Tasks application with the iPhone and nothing in the screen shots indicated it was integrated with the calendar, which is where it should be anyway.

So would MobileMe get me to switch to AT&T and buy an iPhone? It gets me closer. Fix the task list issues and it would make me reconsider.