THE company that could do no wrong and always make technology cool and user-friendly, has stumbled.

In an internal e-mail message to Apple staff, chief executive Steve Jobs said that the company's barely four-week-oldMobileMe Internet service "was simply not up to Apple's standards", that it "clearly needed more time and testing" and that multiple mistakes had been made during the product's launch.

A senior Apple officer has been brought in to take charge, reported Dow Jones, and customers who had signed up for the service were offered a free month of service, along with an apology. MobileMe is a US$99 (S$137)-a-year Web-based feature that sends e-mail messages, contacts and calendar events between a range of Apple devices.

It is an improvement of an earlier system, renamed and overhauled so that iPhone users can use the service, and was re-launched around July 11.

When it was first unveiled, acclaim was almost universal. It was a sign that Apple would conquer so-called "cloud computing", raved critics.

But problems surfaced once MobileMe went operational: There was extended initial downtime, an e-mail failure that led to lost messages, complaints of inability to contact the service to sync, corruption of data, delays in syncing the computer to MobileMe, and more.

The "launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour", read Mr Jobs' memo, dated Monday.

"We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence."

In retrospect, he said, Apple could have staggered the release over a number of months. This would have allowed problems with any specific application to be isolated and fixed, before the next one was rolled out.

"It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store," Mr Jobs wrote.

The memo was first reported by Ars Technica.

The MobileMe team will now report to Mr Eddy Cue, who has led the successful iTunes team for several years.

With this, Mr Cue will take charge of all Apple's Internet services, which include iTunes, the App Store and MobileMe.

He will report directly to Mr Jobs, who said: "The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services. And we will." -- AGENCIES