Apple's iCloud ties Apple apps and devices together

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 05 October 2011 13:51

Your IT - Home IT

Amid all the hype and disappointment surrounding the iPhone5 and its non-appearance, Apple's announcement of iCloud has been somewhat overlooked - but it comes with a host of features and has the potential to lure more users to go 'all Apple' for their computers, phones and tablet devices.

iCloud is a set of free cloud services that seamlessly enable content created or download to one device to be uploaded into the cloud and downloaded to any other of the users devices: Macs, iPod Touches, iPhones and iPads, and iTunes on PCs.

According to Apple, "iCloud stores your music, photos, apps, contacts, calendars, documents and more, keeping them up to date across all your devices. When content changes on one device, all your other devices are updated automatically and wirelessly'¦You can buy an app on your iPad and find it waiting for you on your iPhone - no syncing required. iTunes in the Cloud also lets you download your previously purchased iTunes content to your devices at no additional cost."

And, for US users at least, the service will try and upsell you: "iTunes Match scans the songs in your music library, including music not purchased on iTunes, and matches them to the more than 20 million songs available on the iTunes Store, offering them in high-quality, DRM-free 256 kbps AAC encoding."

Photo Stream synchronises photos taken on one device with the users' other devices, and keeps a backup in the cloud.

Apple's iWork apps for iOS - Pages, Numbers and Keynote - will take advantage of iCloud storage so, for example a document created using Apple's Pages word processor on an iPad is automatically sent to iCloud, and can be opened with Pages on another iOS device. Apple is also offering developers APIs to enable them to add similar functionality to their applications. It has given no indication as to when, or if, the functionality will be available in the Mac versions of the iWork apps.

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