ICloud.com Goes Live, Betas and Price Plans Revealed
Personally I find the pricing horrendous — and here’s why. You can buy a couple of Terrabyte drives or better for the price you would pay for only 50 GB per year. Yes, with Icloud you can then get 50GB of your media “anywhere”. However for less than that you can buy a 64GB SDHC card the size of a postage stamp, and take your media anywhere.
Considering it as your media since you duly paid for it in reality you canshould be able to get your media anywhere already. What apple is really selling is a convenient way to transfer your media while keeping you trapped in their proprietary walled garden.
Right now with ITUNES you are limited to five authorized devices. I have more than that, and most people do. Think of the total number of phones, car stereos, PC’s, radios, laptops, game boxes, and TV’s in your house - in theory you should be able to get your Itunes on any of them without having to buy a special Apple device, and without limits to where you can play your music or video but in practice you can not. Here’s another hint: I pay for web hosting and the price is a lot less than what Apple is selling. What Apple is really selling is convenience that most people outside their walled garden devices can enjoy already. I see this market eventually sorting itself out, but right now to me is seems to be a heavily overpriced service for people who don’t know any better.
Apple’s icloud.com Web site has gone live, allowing developers to test out the online version of MobileMe’s replacement. At the same time, beta versions of the iWork suite for iOS and iPhoto have also been made available. And inevitably, many details have already leaked to the web.
ICloud is Apple’s new “sync” service. When you create or edit a photo or document on your iPhone, iPad, Mac or Windows PC, it is automatically pushed to any other device you have chosen. Thus, you can snap photos on your iPhone and have them ready to edit on your iPad in seconds, along with a safe backup on your home Mac.
The icloud.com site is the online home for your data. There’s a calendar, an address book, a mail web app, access to the Find My iPhone service and a new section called “iWork.” These all look a lot like their iOS counterparts, right down to the icons. This is no surprise, as even the awful MobileMe used a very iPad-like interface for its Mail web app.
Most interesting are the online versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote. Posted screenshots show that there is no editing or even viewing functionality yet. Visitors are told instead to launch the apps on their iOS device and switch on iCloud. Perhaps there will never be a way to view your documents on the web, or maybe it will be added before the official launch.
Right now there doesn’t seem to be any way to view your photos at icloud.com.
Before you state that their GB count doesn’t include “photos, music, etc” recognize the fact that many people have lots of media not in Apple formats. E.G. - Most of my old 250gb hard drive was filled Canon proprietary RAW files & video files before I replaced it with a couple of terrabyte drives & backup drives last year.
Should people sign up for the free plan? If you’ve got multiple Apple devices I don’t see why not. I can’t however recommend that you use the premium plans.