This is the first of a Multi-part series detailing free alternatives to Apple’s MobileMe suite of online services.

Ever used MobileMe? If you have, then you might agree with me in the opinion that Apple really has created a nice suite of services. Originally called iTools, they have morphed into an online hub for all your personal data. You can create a website, share photos, access your calendar and contacts list and check your email. They’ve even given you 20GB of storage space that you can split up between all these services. Let’s also not forget Back to My Mac and find my iPhone. Wrap all these together and you get a total online presence from Apple. What’s this cost you? About $99 per year (you can sometimes get a discount by purchasing a kit through Amazon.com). But let’s say you’re a bit frugal and don’t want to pay for these services. Is there anything out there you can use to mimic all these services for free or really cheap?

The short of it yes… mostly. While there are freebees for all these, there is one service that does not have a match and that’s Apple’s find my iPhone. If you can live without that one, then I can show you a list of alternatives, and then in upcoming articles, I’ll show you how you set all these up on your Mac and your iPhone. So let’s get started.

Email: This is a simple one. Google’s free Gmail service is one of the most widely used, free email addresses on the internet. With Gmail, you get 7GB of space included for free. You can use Apple’s mail application with gmail if you don’t want to use the webmail interface. Gmail can even check other email accounts you have with other services. Gmail is fast and effective.

Address Book: Here’s another easy one. Gmail from Google has a great contacts feature that is incredibly easy to synchronize with your Mac’s address book. It’s a simple option to turn on in your address book’s preference pane and you are all set. You can even synchronize your contacts with your iPhone or iPod Touch via Google Sync.

Calendar: Looks like I’m taking another dive into the Google well one more time. Google’s calendar service allows you to connect via your iCal and synchronize your calendars so you can sync them over different computers and view them over the web as well. You can also set this up on your iPhone and iPod Touch via Google Sync too.

Dropbox is a great iDisk alternative

iDisk: iDisk gives you 10GB of online storage by default, so our free alternative to iDisk doesn’t quite give you the same storage space, but it is free and easy to use. Dropbox comes with 2GB for free standard. You can purchase more storage space if you find yourself using all of it and need more room (50GB will set you back $99 per year… right back to the cost of MobileMe). You can get additional storage, up to 3GB, for free by inviting your friends to join. Dropbox will sync a folder on multiple computers which you can also access over the web from the Dropbox website and then even offer an iPhone app for you to view files you have stored on Dropbox.

Website: You can still get a free website these days through a service like either Blogger or Tumblr. Both of these create blogs that you can edit yourself, upload photos and share your thoughts on anything. Free is good!

Photo Sharing: Flickr is far and away the most popular of the photo sharing sites out on the internet today. A free account is quick and easy to get at Flickr.com. There is also easy integration between Flickr and iPhoto as well. You can easily export to Flickr using the Flickr button in iPhoto.

Back to My Mac: A new service that is now available for the Mac is LogMeIn Free. As I have yet to try it out, I cannot speak to it’s ease and reliability, but I will have a full report for you in this series. If you are willing to jump through some hoops, you can setup a free domain that will point back to your home computer and you can access it through a free program like Chicken Of the VNC. This is a bit more complex to setup, but once it’s done, it works very well.

I hope that this list has helped to show you that there are some pretty good free alternatives to MobileMe out there. This is by no means a full list of all the freebees out there, but you could say this is a good starting point. In the next part in this series, I will show you how to setup a Gmail account and setup your Mac and iPhone to access it and keep your mail in sync between the two.