So everyone knows that Apple will be launching iCloud with iOS5 this fall, but are you sure you understand all the in’s and out’s of this new service? Odds are with everything they’ve thrown out for the media to eat up, you don’t quite have a complete grasp as to what all is included. So, I will do my best to clear up any iCloud uncertainties. I believe that the biggest confusion for users is the way the term iCloud is used interchangeably for a few different services, so I will try and break down the three main ones; iCloud, Photo Stream, and iTunes Match.
iCloud: So this is the main thing right? Everyone wants a cloud? Well coming with iOS5 is iCloud; Apple’s own cloud service that will work with your calendar, contacts, reminders, and Apple’s iWork suite. You will also be able to get a me.com email account through Apple that will also use iCloud. So what exactly does this mean for users?
If you have an iPhone and a Mac, any changes made to a contact or an addition in your calendar will automatically be sent to iCloud and back to any other device you are not using. Basically, any device with your calendar or contacts will be updated. This is very useful for people with a number of iOS devices or Macs. The same goes for iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote). It will automatically keep all your devices up to date with any editing you make to any document. All of these things are also going to be available from the web. You will be able to check your email and use the ‘Find My iPhone’ feature to work on your iWork apps.
This is all free with up to 5 gigabytes of storage, but if you want more space, they’re are additional fees. You can get 10 additional gigs (15 total) for $20/year, 20 more (25 total) for $40/year, and 50 gigs (55 total) for $100/year. While the free 5 gigs will be plenty for most people, heavy users with multiple devices may need more. You can also back up your devices to this iCloud, that way you won’t have to keep them on your computers. Keep in mind though, these back ups may eat through your space faster. When I backed up just my iPhone it used about 1.4 gigs, so you can see if you have 3 devices on the same account how that would burn through the free offering pretty fast. One last thing to note is that Apple is letting developers use iCloud for their apps too, so while it doesn’t seem like an average user would use up that 5 gigs too fast, it will only be a matter of time before we see more apps using this space as well.
Photo Stream: Now, Photo Stream goes right along with iCloud, but its for your pictures. If you take a picture on your iPhone, it will automatically send it to your other iOS devices as well as any Macs you have enabled Photo Stream on. This however does not count against your 5 gigs of iCould space; it operates in its own space. You can have up to 1,000 photos in your stream, but they only stay there for 30 days.. They will still be on whichever device you took them with, and you can keep them on your other things as long as you move them into a different folder. That’s all there is to Photo stream, it’s pretty strait forward.
iTunes Match: This is I think things get the most fuzzy for people, so I will try to explain it in the easiest way possible. Prior to June’s WWDC that Apple held, you were not allowed to re-download things you had purchased from iTunes or the App Store. This is not true anymore, you are now able to revisit your entire purchase history and re-download any music or app you have already paid for. To many this seemed like something that should have been there all along, but it wasn’t. So you can now download music and apps over and over, and they will let you do this on 10 devices, including Macs (only 5 can be Macs though). So you have your iPhone and you are away from home and you really want to hear the new Foo Fighters album, but you forgot to transfer it from your desktop at home, you can just go into iTunes, find the album and click on the cloud symbol and it downloads it right to your phone again. It is a nice feature, but what if the majority of your music is from sources other than iTunes? Well starting this fall Apple will be offering this iTunes Match service for $25/year. What it will do is scan your music files and allow all the music you have to be re-downloaded this way too, making it all available on the go. All of this music will be able to be downloaded at 256 kb/sec, so in some cases this could upgrade your musics quality (it could also downgrade it, too). The biggest pro with this service is the fact that they just scan your library, you don’t have to upload all your music to the cloud, which with larger libraries could take weeks (believe me, I know). I think the main point that people miss here though is that it is a downloading service, not a streaming one, you won’t be streaming this music from the cloud, you will be downloading then listening. So that’s what they have released about iTunes Match.
Random Tidbits: Now along with the ability to re-download music and apps, they also added the functionality of pushing (sending) them to all devices no matter which it was purchased on. So, if I were to buy the latest Bon Iver Album on my iPhone, it will automatically download on my iPad and my MacBook the next time they connect to the internet. This feature I like a lot, maybe it is technically apart of iTunes Match, but I am not sure so I put it here.
I think the iTunes Match service was laid out pretty strait forwardly at WWDC, but very recently Apple pushed an update for their Apple TV’s that made me start to wonder if it was really as cut and dry as I had previously thought. With this update they gave us the ability to buy TV shows as well as rent them (previously it was rental only), along with this you can now stream TV shows you have previously purchased. Right now this is limited to TV shows, but the rumor mills have been swirling as always and it is said that it will be coming for movies soon as well, in a service called iTunes Replay. Whether or not this is true we will have to wait and see, you can also now re -download your TV show purchases, where as before it was just music and apps. So if Apple gets the licensing rights to do this with movies as well (since I am sure that is the only thing holding them back now) it will be another blow against physical media from the tech giant. The oddest part of all of this to me is that they allow you to stream the TV shows, you don’t have to download them. This could only be a feature of the Apple TV though, since they never intended it to be somewhere to download to, they only put an 8 gigabyte hard drive in it, for the software and to cache streaming media. Just the fact that they would allow this streaming makes me second guess the fact that they were so clear on the download only part of iTunes Match, but we will have to wait and see this fall.
