The complaints about .mac are common enough that I won’t get into it, but I just found some great tools from Google that seem to be filling in all of the tools provided by .mac, except for free.

gDisk - this has been around for a little while.  It’s gotten more stable and now works well.  It turns your gmail space into an iDisk-like online storage.  Only instead of the 1 GB you get with .mac for $100, you get 2.7 GB for FREE.

Gmail - access your mail from any browser anywhere at any time.  This accomplishes the same thing as Mail sync without having to download or take up storage on your HDD.  In fact, I’ve started forwarding all of my e-mail to my gmail account.  It works so well with my current workstyle that I’m wondering why I didn’t do this a long time ago.

Google browser sync - this was the missing link to a large extent for me.  It syncs up your bookmarks, cookies, passwords, history, and saved sessions in Firefox.  Close your Firefox browser on one machine, then open up Firefox on another machine with the exact same windows/tabs.  A tear came to my eye when I tried this.

Google calendar - add and change events from any computer at any time.  Then simply open iCal and sync to your online calendar, then sync up your iPod.  You’ll have access to your calendar anywhere.

Now, I’m sure someone can and will come along to point out some minor feature that you get with .mac that is not mentioned here and that they simply must have.  But it would take quite the missing feature to justify $100 a year versus FREE.

At the very least, maybe this kind of competition with get it through Apple’s thick skulls that .mac is in need of a major overhaul and price drop.