June 7, 2011: Apple has unveiled a breakthrough set of free new cloud services, tagged ‘iCloud’, that work seamlessly with applications on iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or PC devices to automatically and wirelessly store content ‘in the cloud’ and automatically and wirelessly push it to all your devices.
The former MobileMe services-Contacts, Calendar and Mail-all completely re-architected and rewritten to work seamlessly with iCloud. Users can share calendars with friends and family, and the ad-free push Mail account is hosted at me.com. Your inbox and mailboxes are kept up-to-date across all your iOS devices and computers. iCloud Backup automatically and securely backs up your iOS devices to iCloud daily over Wi-Fi when they are charged. Backed up content includes music, apps and books, photos and videos, device settings and app data. If you replace your iOS device, just enter your Apple ID and password during setup and iCloud restores your new device.
iCloud’s innovative Photo Stream service automatically uploads the photos you take or import on any of your devices and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices and computers. So you can use your iPhone to take photos of your friends during the afternoon baseball game, and they will be ready to share with the entire group on your iPad (or even Apple TV) when you return home.
Photo Stream is built into the photo apps on all iOS devices, iPhoto on Macs, and saved to the Pictures folder on a PC. To save space, the last 1,000 photos are stored on each device so they can be viewed or moved to an album to save forever. Macs and PCs will store all photos from the Photo Stream, since they have more storage. iCloud will store each photo in the cloud for 30 days, providing time to connect your devices and automatically download the latest photos from Photo Stream via Wi-Fi. The iCloud beta and Cloud Storage APIs are available immediately to iOS and Mac Developer Program members at developer.apple.com. iCloud will be available in the third quarter of 2011 concurrent with iOS 5. Users can sign up for iCloud for free on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 5 or a Mac running Mac OS X Lion with a valid Apple ID. iCloud includes 5GB of free cloud storage for Mail, Document Storage and Backup. Purchased music, apps, books and Photo Stream do not count against the storage limit. iTunes Match will be available for $24.99 per year (US only).
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