Apple has announced that its content-syncing service iCloud is now live. iCloud is designed like a mobile hard drive on your web browser that automatically syncs data on mobile devices and tablets with data on your home or office computer. The service is especially useful for those preparing presentations and projects while on the go.
The new beta is available to anyone with an Apple ID, and includes Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Find My iPhone, and iWork applications. Apple’s cloud music services are not presently available. While the iCloud is similar to MobileMe in concept, the addition of iWork (the Apple equivalent to Microsoft Office) should prove to be extremely useful.
The interface is fairly homogeneous to MobileMe and retains the simplistic Apple template. iCloud will be competing with Amazon’s much cheaper Cloud Drive which allows 20 GB for $20 and is more musically focused.
iCloud is free for the first 5 GB of storage. Most will opt for the free service considering that they will not be storing music on iCloud. The free beta should prove to be popular among iPhone, iPad, and Apple computer enthusiasts looking to become more organized.
Time will tell, but I think cloud computing is going to be the eventual replacement for flash drives. It’s an exciting concept that whatever you are working on can be easily accessed again for reference on another device. The bad news is, the excuse of “I left my paper on marketing research analysis at home” will no longer be acceptable when my professor tells me to pull it up on my iPhone’s cloud connection. E-mailing documents to myself is starting to get a little old, too. As with any beta, though, the best improvements are yet to come for Apple’s iCloud.
The information in this post came from an external article on Mashable.
