Steve Jobs took to the stage at Apple’s WWDC opening keynote speech today to announce iCloud.
He began by reminding the audience of Apple’s ‘Digital Hub’ strategy of a decade ago. Jobs acknowledged that in the years since then devices have changed and users want access to their media wherever they happen to be.
The Digital Hub, he said, is now in the cloud, or the iCloud. iCloud, said Jobs stores your content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes it to all your devices. It’s also integrated with your apps.
In an admission that MobileMe has been pretty awful, Jobs described it as not ‘our finest hour,’ but claimed that Apple had learned a great deal from it. Three core elements of MobileME have been re-designed to be cloud apps. Changes on one device are automatically pushed to other devices. Mail now keeps inboxes and folders up-to-date automatically on all devices. Best of all, iCloud will be free.
Important data, including purchased music, apps, books, photos, and device settings are automatically backed up to iCloud once a day.
There are three more elements to iCloud.
Documents, supported in Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, automatically pushes documents created on any device to iCloud. It then pushes the document to all the devices on which you have the application installed. Third party apps will also be able to store documents in iCloud.
Photo Stream, said Jobs will ‘bring the cloud to photos.’ It allows photos taken on one device to be automatically pushed to other devices so that, say photos taken on an iPhone, are sent to an iPad without the need to manually sync. Photos in iPhoto on a Mac can be pushed to iOS devices. Photo Stream will also work on Apple TV. Up to 1000 photos can be stored on iOS devices and images can be stored for up to 30 days in iCloud. Those you want to keep can be copied to an album.
The final part of iCloud is iTunes, the long-expected cloud music service. Any album you’ve bought on iTunes from any device can be downloaded to any other device on your account. And when you buy songs in the future, they’ll be automatically downloaded to all devices — up to ten in total. iTunes Match allows you to match the songs in your iTunes Library that you’ve ripped from CD or downloaded from other stores with songs in Apple’s iTunes catalogue. You can then access those songs in iCloud too. Any that Apple can’t identify, you can upload yourself. Tracks are ‘upgraded’ to 256K AAC. iTunes match costs $25. year.
Missing from iCloud is the ability to stream music from Apple’s servers to an iOS device or computer.
iCloud includes 5GB of free storage for Mail, Documents, and back-up. It will be available in the Autumn.
