iCloud won’t sync Keychain items or Email accounts between computers anymore. If you’re like me and have multiple machines, these features are really valuable and don’t have a viable replacement. Some users have started linking their Keychains files to a directory on Dropbox and using that as a cheap solution, but this doesn’t take merges into account. If you update your keychain on two computers at the same time, you’ll have to pick one or the other which means losing information.

MobileMe’s going to be active until June of 2012 which gives Apple plenty of time to create a solution, but I have a feeling they won’t. That leaves it up to a 3rd party. So far I’m not aware of any decent alternative. I know a lot of people are fans of 1Password but I gather they’re really targeted at saving your web passwords, which is still a useful feature but not really what I’m after.

So it’s kind of a weird thing. I’ve been a paying customer of a service I’ve gotten value out of for nearly 10 years. Now Apple is replacing this service with something free that doesn’t do what I originally paid for. Oh well, I hear iCloud supports Windows Vista.

The fix was to turn off syncing of Contacts and Calendars in iTunes. Then turn off MobileMe syncing for Contacts and Calendars from the iPhone. Turn them back on and the you’ll be prompted to merge your contacts and calendars which you should do. When done, you’ll be syncing over the air, but not to your computer which should be syncing to whatever service you use anyway.