Yesterday at WWDC, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs took the stage to introduce the major new service and unveiled Apple’s online storage and content management service – iCloud, as expected. iCloud has been in the making for 10 years. With iCloud, the digital hub is being moved to the cloud. With iCloud, information is automatically uploaded to iCloud and then delivered back to all of your Apple devices so you have the latest files and versions at any time. “Everything happens automatically and there’s nothing new to learn. It just all works” says Steve Jobs. It’s completely integrated with all of your apps. To setup iCloud, you need to log in with your Apple ID
iBooks, photos and videos, device settings, purchased music, home screen, app organization, Text and MMS messages, Ringtones, as well as app data that will be automatically backed up over Wi-Fi. The backup feature will only work over Wi-Fi. Contacts, calendar and Mail are no longer MobileMe apps. iCloud will take the place of MobileMe. Yes! MobileMe is now no more. Here Apple isn’t just rebranding the MobileMe as iCloud, but it is also removing the $99 price tag attached to it. iCloud will be free of ads and free of charge, and coming this fall. Users will be geting 5GB of free storage, for documents, back ups, mail, and more. iCloud support for up to 20,000 songs. There will be no advertising.
Purchased apps and books can now be downloaded on all your devices. Users will now be able to see their purchase history, and just with the tap of a single button, they will be able to download any apps and books to any iOS device. Apple also introduced the new Photo Stream Cloud feature. The feature lets all your photos to be synced with the iCloud. When you take a picture with iPhone, it will be uploaded in the cloud and it will be synced across your iPhone, iPad (all iDevices), Mac and even PC. Photo Stream will work on Apple TV as well. Photos sent to Apple’s iCloud will stay there for 30 days, so they can be synced to all other devices before they are automatically removed and the iCloud will store 1,000 pictures on the devices. Apple also added Automatic Cloud Backup feature – This service will back up all the important data once daily, and than it can be synced wirelessly to a new device from the cloud.
iTunes in the Cloud – This feature works just for songs purchased from iTunes. You can now download any purchased song to any of your devices for free, and all of your devices can download newly purchased music. iTunes in the Cloud supports up to a total of 10 devices. It is completely free, with a beta version available today (in the US only). Another app of the iCloud is Documents. With this, Cloud can sync the documents wirelessly from one device to the other devices. Documents in the Cloud will effortlessly sync Pages, Numbers, and Keynote data between all of your iOS devices. Here everything happens automatically. Other content purchased from iTunes and the App Store will come across via the iCloud service as well.
Apple has also announced iTunes Match. There will be a $24.99 (for up to 25,000 songs) annual subscription fee for this feature. This allows iCloud users to upload their entire music library to iCloud.