What is iCloud?

After much talk from Apple, iCloud is finally here! (Well almost.) So you may be asking yourself, what’s an iCloud? Some kind of evil genius plot by Apple to control the weather? Genius yes! Weather no!

According to Apple, "iCloud stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more. And wirelessly pushes them to all your devices — automatically. It’s the easiest way to manage your content. Because now you don’t have to.”

The simplest way to think of it is a hard drive in the sky. Imagine an invisible cloud following you anywhere around the world holding your personal media content, letting you access your favorite stuff instantly! iCloud stores your content so that you can get to it from your iPad, iPhone, iTouch or your computer. Plus, iTunes works with iCloud meaning anything use purchase from it will automatically be sent to your other devices without paying extra for it. And the best part is…….. it’s FREE!

Yes, free. When you sign up you get 5GB of free storage. Now you may be thinking that does not sound like a lot. However, not everything counts against your storage. Your music (purchased through iTunes), apps, books, as well as your Photo Stream are not counted. That means your mail, documents, Camera Roll, account information, settings, and other app data is all that counts against your free 5 GB.

What’s Photo Stream? With iCloud, when you take a picture with an iOS device like your iPhone, you can have it automatically appear on your other devices like your iPad, Mac or stream to your Apple TV. How it works: iCloud automatically sends a copy of the photo over any available Wi-Fi network to the Photos app on your iOS devices. This is especially cool when streaming it to Apple TV. Now you can show off your vacation photos on the big screen.

What’s the catch? Photo Stream only holds 1000 of your latest photos. But that’s not bad considering it saves you storage space on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Also, iCloud may have a problem with music not purchased through iTunes. I know that's gonna be a huge dilemma for a lot of people, me included. However, we wont know for certain until iCloud is actually released.

So what does all this mean? Death to Mobile Me! Effective June 7th Mobile Me has reached the end of it’s life and Apple will no longer activate new accounts. Don’t be sad though… Mobile Me costs $99 per year and was not half as useful as iCloud. I certainly wont miss paying the annual fee.

iCloud comes out this Fall and we can’t be more excited!!

If you want to see more information like this visit our blog Tech Tips or visit our website lajollahomeaudio.com.