The New Offer from Apple

iCloud, the cloud based service brought in by Apple offers nine applications that includes iTunes, mail, contacts and calendar free with this fee based storage option in the company’s effort to unite desktop and mobile computing devices by the help of this cloud based network synchronization. It will store the content in the cloud and will make it available wirelessly to all the devices. As it is also completely integrated with the applications there is nothing new to learn and everything just happens automatically.What is it?

iCloud is actually consisted of nine applications like the iTunes in the cloud, Photo Stream, books, documents, apps, mail, contacts, calendar and backup. The beta version is now available for the Mac OS X and iOS developers. Apple has scheduled the general release during the fall along with the iOS 5, the next mobile operating system offered by the brand. iTunes in the Cloud is used to push songs purchased through iTunes to all the devices used by the purchaser and at the same time keeps a copy on the Apple’s servers. Photo Stream is used to do the same for the 1000 most recent photographs taken by any iOS device. All the other applications provide similar cloud storage and synchronization abilities in distributing messages, contacts and calendar entries through the apple devices.

How much it is going to cost?

Excluding the storage part, iCloud will be absolutely free and any iCloud user will have to pay 25 dollar annually for iTunes Match to store copies of songs not purchased from iTunes store in an iTunes library. The users of iCloud may also need to pay more for the general storage to store more files remotely.

Future Prospects

It is most likely to be well received among the users as it frees it from the hassles of synchronizing different iOS devices and provides with a convenient way to make files accessible wirelessly from any iOS device. With this introduction Apple has done a fantastic job to make data management easier and seamless.

Further Developments

By making the API available for the developers Apple is encouraging the development of new applications that will use the iCloud. It is still too early to predict any security threats. But with this Apple is quite sure to gain more control over its Application store to put its competitors at an disadvantage as modern personal computing experience being more fragmented and a lot of personal information left scattered through multiple devices.  The modern user needs to think seriously about it as it has a lot more potentials yet to be unpacked.