Apple iCloud Details Revealed by Steve Jobs at WWDC 2011
The details of the Apple iCloud service have been revealed by Steve Jobs at the annual Apple worldwide developers conference (wwdc 2011) today.
The iCloud service marks a significant shift in the personal computing era as trendsetter Steve Jobs signals a move aware from the PC and local data storage towards the data cloud.
He said,
“Today it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices, iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it, it all just works.”
The iCloud services will be free and means additional features mainly focused around sharing data across devices, these include:
- The former MobileMe® services, Contacts, Calendar and Mail rewritten for iCloud. Users can share calendars with friends and family, the ad-free push Mail account is hosted at me.com. Mailboxes are kept up-to-date across all Apple devices and computers.
- The App Store™ and iBookstore℠ now download purchased iOS apps and books to all Apple devices, not just the device they were purchased on. In addition, the App Store and iBookstore now let you see your purchase history, and tapping the iCloud icon will download any apps and books to any iOS device (up to 10 devices) at no additional cost.
- iCloud Backup automatically and securely backs up any Apple devices to iCloud daily over Wi-Fi when charging the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Backed up content includes purchased music, apps and books, camera roll (photos and videos), device settings and app data. If you replace your iOS device, the iCloud will restore to the new device.
- iCloud Storage stores all documents created using iCloud storage APIs (the API allows 3rd parties to access it’s abilities) and automatically pushes them to all your devices. If you change a document on any device, iCloud automatically pushes the changes to all devices. Apple’s Pages®, Numbers® and Keynote® apps already take advantage of iCloud Storage.
- Users get up to 5GB of free storage for their mail, documents and backup (excludes the storage used for music, apps, photo stream and books purchased from Apple. Users will be able to buy more storage if needed.
- iCloud’s Photo Stream service automatically uploads the photos you take or import on any of your devices and wirelessly pushes them to all devices and computers. 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. iCloud will store each photo in the cloud for 30 days, giving time to connect devices to iCloud and automatically download the latest photos from Photo Stream via Wi-Fi.
- iTunes® in the Cloud lets you download previously purchased iTunes music to all your iOS devices at no additional cost, and new music purchases can be downloaded automatically to all your devices. In addition, music not purchased from iTunes can gain the same benefits by using iTunes Match, a service that replaces music with a 256 kbps AAC DRM-free version if Apple can match it to the over 18 million songs in the iTunes Store®, it makes the matched music available in minutes (instead of having to upload all your tunes), and uploads only the small percentage of unmatched music. iTunes Match will be available for a $24.99 annual fee.
Apple has three data centers that will be used for the iCloud service, lets hope they are ready for the demand considering the huge numbers of people now owning Apple products.
iCloud will be available in the fall and people can sign up for the iCloud service 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.
iTunes in the Cloud is available today in the US and requires iTunes 10.3 and iOS 4.3.3. Automatic download of apps and books is available today. Using iCloud with a PC requires Windows Vista or Windows 7; Outlook 2010 or 2007 is recommended for accessing contacts and calendars.
Although services will début in the US, other territories will be available but it will be the launch of the iPhone 5 that will kick off the iCloud era late in 2011.
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