iCloud was announced by Steve Jobs at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) on June 6th. iCloud, along with iOS 5, has been available since October 12th.
The benefits of moving to iCloud are:
• Seamless sync and daily backup for all of your iOS devices.
• Mail, contacts, calendars, notes or reminders are synced to all your iOS devices and computers.
• Remote access to all of your iTunes purchases.
• Purchases automatically downloaded to all of your iOS devices.
• Any documents created in Pages, Numbers and Keynote are automatically saved on the cloud and available to your other devices.
• You can specify on each device what type of content to sync.
The aspects of MobileMe not supported by iCloud are iWeb publishing, Gallery and iDisk.
5 gig of iCloud storage is provided at no cost. Purchases and Photo Stream photos do not count towards the 5 gig. Additional storage can be purchased but, for me, 5 gig of storage is plenty. So, as an additional benefit, I will be saving the $99 MobileMe annual subscription fee.
The move to iCloud was seamless, as in typical Apple fashion. Basically, it consisted of backing up and then moving to the cloud. Using my MacBook Pro, running Mac OS X 10.7.2 (Lion), it was very easy to move my content and sync my iPad and iPhone 4 with the cloud. Step by step instructions can be found at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4918.
Steve Jobs’ assessment at WWDC was that “it all just works.” For the most part, that is true but the one thing that I found lacking is podcast support. The cloud does not update or sync your podcasts. You still need to use your Mac or PC for updates. To fill this void, I am using iCatcher! ($1.99 in the App Store). iCatcher! will download new episodes when available and sync the play status across your iOS devices via the cloud.
