iCloud Has Just Tipped the Balance Towards iOS

Steve Jobs waited until his colleagues finished their interventions on iOS and Mac OS X to present what everybody wanted to see, iCloud. And what Jobs presented was nothing short of amazing.

Here are the details presented today at WWDC about iCloud.

• Mobile Me has been re-written to work seamlessly with iCloud. Same features, no pricing. And this time works.
• The App Store and iBookstore now let you see your purchase history, and simply by tapping the iCloud icon will download any apps and books to any iOS device up to 10 devices. This is already going on as we speak.
• When you charge your iDevice, it backs-up to iCloud over Wi-fi. The back-up includes music, apps, books, photos and videos on the Camera Roll. If you change your device just input your Apple ID credemntials and it restores your device. 
• iCloud's API allows apps to automatically store data from those apps and pushes them to all your devices. When you update any document, like a Pages document, it changes throughout all your devices. Users get up to 5GB of free storage for their mail, documents and backup (music, apps, books do not count in this 5GB)! More storage can be bought and details about pricing will be available in the Fall. 
• iCloud’s innovative Photo Stream takes the pictures you have taken with your device and pushes it to all your devices. 1,000 photos can be stores at once, PC and Macs can store more, but in the cloud they can stay 30 days. 
• iTunes in the Cloud lets you download your previously purchased iTunes music to all your iOS devices at no cost! You can even download new music purchases and can be downloaded automatically to all your devices. For music not purchased trough iTunes, you can pay for a service called iTunes Match. iTunes Match replaces your music with a 256 kbps AAC DRM-free version if we can match it to the over 18 million songs in the iTunes Store®, it makes the matched music available in minutes (instead of weeks to upload your entire music library), and uploads only the small percentage of unmatched music. iTunes Match will be available this fall for a $24.99 annual fee. 

A free beta version of iTunes in the Cloud, without iTunes Match, for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users running iOS 4.3. iTunes in the Cloud will support all iPhones that iOS 5 supports this fall.

The iCloud beta and Cloud Storage APIs are available immediately to iOS and Mac Developer Program members at developer.apple.com. iCloud includes 5GB of free cloud storage for Mail, Document Storage and Backup. Purchased music, apps, books and Photo Stream do not count against the storage limit. iTunes Match will be available for $24.99 per year (US only).