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Products: iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, iTunes

Apple iCloud compared to Amazon and Google services

Another feature of iCloud is the ability to store your documents. First, there is Photo Stream, which stores the last thousand photos you have taken. Regardless of whether you take them on your iPhone or download them from your camera to your Mac/PC, iCloud keeps the last thousand photos from the last thirty days on all devices, including Apple TV, enough for you to show off your experiences to your friends without having to think about where you stored them. Apple considers this so important that it has also removed PhotoStream from the data limit. But beware, iCloud only keeps photos in PhotoStream for the last thirty days, then deletes them, but until then you should be able to choose the ones you want to save on your device. The original photos are permanently stored on your desktop, where there is enough space for them.

Other types of files stored in iCloud include your purchased apps, books, app settings, text and MMS messages, ringtones, and device settings. iCloud has 5GB of space reserved for these files. Backups are performed daily via WiFi. If you buy a new iOS device, everything will automatically download to it, and you’ll be synced even without a computer. iCloud thus replaces iTunes, and it’s nice for iOS devices that Apple has untethered it from iTunes. You can now perform system upgrades without iTunes and use iCloud for all data exchanges. What does this mean? Mobile devices running iOS are no longer tied to a computer; they can now exist independently, and iTunes is an option, not a necessity. This heralds major changes, with iPads becoming completely autonomous devices, rather than just desktop accessories, as is the case today.

The existing MobileMe features, i.e., synchronized calendar, address book, and email, are also being moved to iCloud—and, conveniently, they will be free from now on. And again, synchronized: when an email arrives, it appears on all devices; when a contact is updated, it appears on all associated devices within moments.

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