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The centre of gravity shifts from your computer to the cloud

iCloud is a cloud computing service from Apple Inc. announced on June 6, 2011 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. The service allows users to store data such as music files for download to multiple devices such as iPhones, iPods, iPads, and personal computers running Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows on computer servers owned by Apple.

iCloud can wirelessly push content to all the listed devices automatically and integrate with apps like Contacts, Mail, and iCal that were all previously handled by Apple’s old cloud service, MobileMe.

iPhones and iPads often store important and irreplaceable information. Currently, if you don’t regularly plug your iPhone or iPad into your computer you’re at risk of losing photos, contact info and more.

With iCloud, all of the information on your device is automatically backed up wirelessly on a daily basis. In case you break or lose your iPhone or iPad, you can revive all of your information by simply logging into your iCloud account with a new device.

The iPhone is the best Apple device to take photos with, but it’s not the best one for sharing pictures with friends and family at home. Transferring pictures to a computer or iPad now requires synchronizing devices or using third-party apps to transfer the images.

With iCloud, the most recent photos snapped with your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad 2 are automatically available to view on any other iOS device or computer. As soon as you snap a photo, it’s uploaded to iCloud and then downloaded to your iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad and/or computer.

With iCloud, users will be able to match the music they’ve purchased through iTunes, copied from CDs or purchased elsewhere with 1.8 million songs in Apple’s catalog. Instead of uploading several GB with of songs, iCloud will examine your music collection.

If your tunes are available from Apple, you’ll be able to download songs and albums from iCloud whenever you want. You can use up to 10 iOS devices with iTunes Match

If Apple doesn’t find a match for a particular song in its catalog, you can upload it from your computer to iCloud. This means you’ll only need to upload a relatively small portion of your music collection.

If you’ve been collecting music for several years you probably have a good number of songs that don’t sound as good as they could. When songs are matched from your collection to Apple’s iTunes catalog, they’ll be available for you to download in high quality at 256 Kbps.

What is the future for iCloud, you may ask.

A new report from RBC Capital Markets projects that as many as 150 million iPhone users could sign on to Apple’s new iCloud service in the very near future. The repercussions for this could be monumental.

Send your comments to sharad@cyber-gear.com

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