Apple, the makers of iPhone, has unveiled the much awaited cloud based storage and syncing service for its devices. With this, Apple comes in direct competition with other cloud service providers that have recently joined this league such as the Google and Amazon and not to forget the countless other third party service providers as well.
Contrary to earlier expectations that it will provide 2GB of storage space to its users over the cloud as being offered by the Amazon, Apple has offered 5GB of storage space to each user. Of course this storage space will be shared across all Apple devices, such as iPhones and iMacs, owned by a single user.
What makes this service commendable is the idea for which many other competitors might just say that Apple is going crazy. The users of this service can save all their purchased songs, applications, eBooks and even the photo-stream and surprisingly enough saving these on your cloud space will not cost any space deductions from the 5GB limit. The 5GB space will be used to save user generated content like documents, calendars, schedules and application setting files. All this and apple has decided to keep this completely free.
The iCloud service provides excellent backup for the files of a user while reducing their expenses on portable devices. With the iCloud, the same application would be allowed to be installed on multiple devices and that too for unlimited number of times. Once purchased, the content is automatically saved on the cloud which is then automatically pushed to all the other devices connected to it automatically.
Apple has given very detailed thoughts about the future of this service as well. It is not just limited to purchased copyrighted content but users can also make use of the iTunes Match feature which allows the users to save their own music from their music libraries that can be ripped from audio CD’s or taken from friends ion to the apple cloud by paying a nominal fee of 25 US dollars for year of storage.