Apples iCloud Services, A Central File Depot For Your Media!

Steve Jobs took a break from his medical leave today in order to reveal the details on Apple’s new iCloud service. The iCloud is Apples solution for connecting all your devices to a central repository for all your media files. This concept allows you to “store your content in iCloud and automatically and wirelessly push it to all your devices. When anything changes on one of your devices, all of your devices are wirelessly updated almost instantly." Apple also claims that the free suite of iCloud services will work seamlessly with your iPhone, iPod, iPad, Mac or PC. You will get 5GB of space for Mail, Document Storage and Backup. Purchased music, apps, books and Photo Stream don't count as part of the 5GB limit.

The expected part of this service was the ability to have all your purchased music in iTunes available across all your devices and computers for no additional cost, new music purchases are pushed to all devices at the same time. "It shows the history of all the songs you've bought on any device. I can download any song to any device by pushing that little cloud button," said Jobs.
But what if you ripped your music from CD’s or downloaded them from a torrent? The iTunes match service will search through your music library and replace songs with a 256 kbps AAC DRM-free version if it can match the song to one of the 18 millon songs available on iTunes store. If not then no harm. This service will cost $24.99 and a free beta version is available now.

The unexpected element from today’s announcement was the ability to not only put your music in the cloud but any content you want to share among your devices.

“"iCloud Storage seamlessly stores all documents created using iCloud Storage APIs, and automatically pushes them to all your devices. When you change a document on any device, iCloud automatically pushes the changes to all your 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—which is more amazing since the storage for music, apps and books purchased from Apple, and the storage required by Photo Stream doesn't count towards this 5GB total.”

The photo specific version of this known as ‘Photo Stream’ automatically uploads photos to the cloud and pushed them to all your devices and computers.

In the fall when iCloud ships there will be a pricing structure released for users that wish to purchase additional space in the cloud

One final service in the iCloud workd was the backup service allowing you to securely backup you iOS devices to the cloud over Wi-Fi when you recharge your device.

"We've added wireless backup to the cloud. Once daily, we're gonna back up a lot of your important content to the cloud. If you ever get a new phone, everything will be loaded onto that phone automatically," said Jobs