WWDC Roundup: iCloud

Out of the three things covered today at the WWDC by Apple the iCloud features announced was probably the biggest (OS X Lion and iOS 5 being the other two).  Steve Jobs himself handled that portion of the keynote by himself after leaving the other two portions to other members of the top management of the company which clearly shows where Apple thought the "meat" of the show was.  After watching a live stream thanks to someone there risking the wrath of Apple by sneaking it out and following a couple of live blogs I have to agree.  The Lion portion actually bored me into not really paying attention and the iOS 5 part had some interesting, but expected, high notes but the iCloud part had me sitting up and paying close attention.  Rather close attention.

So, what exactly can we expect from the new iCloud?  

(You can check the Apple site for their write up of the various features by clicking here.)

The number one thing that really stuck out to me was that services that used to cost $99 per year with Mobile Me are going to become completely free.  That includes mail sync and storage of up to 5GB, calendar syncing, and contact syncing that was the core of Mobile Me.  What's new is that by tying your Apple ID and purchase history for everything from music to apps to books and magazines you'll now have access to re-download that content at anytime on any of up to 10 devices (an increase from the traditional 5).  In the past if you lost a mobile device or had a hard drive failure on your computer (Mac or PC) you would have to re-purchase that content.  Folks, I have to tell you now that this is huge.  For almost ten years the standard party line from Apple was that while they were sorry for your loss of purchased content if you wanted it back you'd have to pony up the money and buy it again.  Now the worry about lost content is almost completely gone from the equation.

Clearly iTunes content in the form of music, apps, and iBooks content is a huge focus point for Apple.  The really shocking part is the fact that Apple is providing the basic service for free!  All your previously purchased content can be downloaded at any time to any device you own.  Want to run an app but haven't got it synced to your iPhone?  Simply re-download it from iCloud.  Forgot to sync a book your purchased on your iPad to your iPhone?  Ditto on downloading from iCloud.

A lot of the rumors surrounding iCloud speculated that some sort of basic service would be included for free but one would have to pay some sort of annual premium for stuff like the music part.  App and iBook content was never even speculated about as far as I can remember.  There is a "premium" part of the service that came with one of the classic Steve Jobs "One more thing" moments, iTunes Match.  For an annual fee of $24.99 Apple can scan your entire music collection for content that was not purchased from the iTunes store and see if it is something that is available from them.  If so then you have access to 256kbps iTunes Plus versions that are DRM free.  If the music is from CDs you ripped yourself or from another online source such as Amazon is then added to your iCloud library for listening on any device at any time.  If the music in question is not available in iTunes you have the option to upload it to iCloud yourself.  Again, this is huge and it's not something that Google or Amazon are offering at the moment.  Amazon will add new purchases to their cloud based storage but you're stuck uploading any past purchases from their store or others which can literally take over a week depending on your ISP upload speeds.

For me personally this was on my wish list for today but I seriously didn't expect it to be so broad in scope.  Most of the music in my collection is from the Amazon MP3 Store over the past three some odd years that it's been around.  I started shopping there because they were the first to offer DRM free music at a fairly high bit rate but I always hated the download software they use due to its rather buggy nature of not completing downloads and my then having to contact Amazon customer service to get the rest of my tracks.  That and the fact they offer a crap load of free sampler albums from various labels.  I've not used their cloud locker system because I've not wanted to have to upload so much content and now with iCloud that is a non-issue.

One word of caution to readers who don't get their music legally.  I would recommend they be very careful when iCloud launches and read the entire End User License Agreement before allowing Apple to scan your collection.  Most of the record companies have on file the digital fingerprint of many of the compression ratios that make up most of the illegal music found via various file sharing services such as Bit Torrent, Napster, Limewire, and others.  By letting Apple scan your collection you may be allowing the record companies to target you for one their lawsuits.  Of course Apple just wrote all the labels and publishers some rather large checks with the promise of more revenue sharing from the iCloud service so that may mollify those companies but it may not and all it will take is one subpoena top open up the flood gates.  In other words, be careful.

Other features of iCloud include document sharing via the iWork suite of applications for iOS devices and a photo streaming feature that will store your last 1000 pictures for 30 days on Apple servers.  The photo streaming feature could be very nice for those who take a lot of pictures with their iOS devices and want them shared among them.  A new Air Play portion of this can stream those photos to your Apple TV as well.  Nice.

Overall I think Apple has hit a home run with iCloud.  To paraphrase Steve Jobs, if Apple wants people to use their devices then offering services such as these for mostly free is a very good way to get more of their products into the hands of more people.  It becomes a win for the consumer and a win for Apple.