Apple Announcement Roundup Part 3/3

iCloud

Finally in the line up of new things announced by Apple is iCloud. iCloud is the product that will replace MobileMe, and in addition it will be completely free. iCloud provides you with 5 GB of storage, and in the future you will be able to buy storage. No pricing has been announced yet, but I would assume it is like DropBox where you would pay a yearly fee to have more then 5 GB of storage. 

So what does iCloud do? Well, it wirelessly syncs content through all of your devices simultaneously. In other words, if you buy the Abbey Road album, it will sync from your phone to your iPad, iPod Touch, and Mac all at once. This way, when you get home your music will be there. However, what happens if you deleted a song you bought off iTunes? You don't want to have to pay for it again right? Well, you no longer have to. With iCloud, iTunes now has the ability to allow you to download pre-purchased music.

Let's talk photos. People use their smartphone more then cameras now a days, and Apple realized this. If you take a photo with your iPhone, it will be sent to the cloud and distributed to your other devices, just like music. However, there is a catch to this one. All your photos in the cloud will start to be deleted after 30 days because Apple needs to keep space for you. In addition, your computer will keep all the photos permanently, where as your mobile devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch etc.) will keep the last 1000 photos you have taken. This is known as "Photo Stream". If you want to keep any of the photos located in the stream, all you have to do is save it to an album and it is permanently saved.

There is also documents, which is essentially the same as music. The only slight difference is that with documents, you will not be limited to Apple developed applications in the future. You will be able to use 3rd Party apps to utilize this feature.

Remember that "post PC world" that I mentioned yesterday. Well this is really geared to work with iCloud. You will be able to setup your device with out connecting to iTunes, and in addition you will be able to restore your device information from a backup made in iCloud. All you have to do is be connected to WiFi and sign in with your Apple ID, then you just wait for all your information to download to your device. Of course, you can always do it the old way if you wish.

With this service of course comes the integration of Mail, iCal, and Contacts. With each of these synced to the cloud, you don't have to worry about adding an event to your home computer, and then syncing it to your device. When a change is made, it is made through out every device. There will even be something call "iCloud Sharing". Here is how it will work. Let us say Bob and Marry are married and both own iPhones running iOS 5. If they setup iCloud sharing for their calendar app, then when Bob makes a change to add an event to his calendar, Marry will be able to see it and vice versa. How this will work exactly I am not sure, but that is the gist of it.

Well that is it, an entire round up of everything coming later this year from Apple. iCloud is already active, if you have iTunes 10.3 you can see it in action with the pre-purchased music I spoke of.

~Dave