Possible iCloud Feature List
Not much is known about iCloud other than that Apple will officially unveil the service next week at WWDC alongside Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and iOS 5. The most obvious aspect of these three products launching alongside one another is that they’ll all be deeply integrated, but what does that mean? What is iCloud going to be and what will it offer? Let’s take a look.
Possible iCloud Features
iCloud is expected to offer a barrage of new abilities and integration to both Mac OS X Lion and iOS 5. The increasingly well-connected MG Siegler of TechCrunch says “we know – or think we know” iCloud may offer the following features:
- iTunes library mirroring and streaming to any device, no uploading of media or songs required
- Music streaming from your browser via iTunes.com
- Movie & television streaming
- iDrive & iDisk integration in Mac OS X Finder and iOS
- Photostreaming, possibly with Twitter and/or Facebook integration
- Advanced location services beyond “Find my iPhone” and “Find my Mac”
- Improved voices and speech recognition, the improved voices are already found in Mac OS X Lion developer builds
- Dramatic improvements to existing MobileMe features including syncing of email, calendar, address book
- Improved notifications delivered and maintained via iCloud, access your iPhone notifications from your Mac, and vice versa?
- Game Center becomes a gaming network much like PSN and Xbox Live
- Wireless iOS device syncing, this has been long anticipated, and the New York Times reported earlier in the year that it was coming
- Free entry-level iCloud services, including syncing of the calendar, address book, bookmarks, iBooks, Find my iPhone, and email. Possibly $99 for access to all other features. This is in line with the report from AppleInsider indicating that some iCloud services will be free with the purchase of Lion.
This list could be entirely hypothetical, but TechCrunch has become a more reliable source of Apple rumors as of late, suggesting that there are truths mixed in with some speculation here. Regardless, iCloud is looking like an exciting service and we’ll find out for sure come WWDC next week.
Hmm… feels like this: http://blog.tice.de/a_pics/iChain.jpg
What about online backup, TimeMachine to the cloud? Surely that would be an obvious feature of a cloud service too.
@Parakeet – MANY people use MobileMe already and that number would only increase with more features. A price decrease would be great… I think $39/year is more reasonable for what it currently offers. I don’t see how it could be free w/o ads (ick)
So, this whole iCloud thing is very foggy (pun intended). Do y’all think iCloud & MobileMe would eventually be a part of the same service? That would seem like a natural progression.
iCloud is almost certainly going to merge if not consume MobileMe. What is known as MobileMe now might even be what is free in Lion, assuming that rumor holds true.
Well, I just renewed my subscription for MobileMe. I hope I get a refund. ;-P
Wireless syncing is a must, but what would be even COOLER would be if wireless syncing was true cloud syncing, meaning you can sync to your home computer from anywhere. THAT would be amazing.
The other stuff is obviously huge but kind of mundane to me, but I also never found MobileMe worthy of the cost.
[…] Mac OS X 10.7 Lion will be “aggressively priced” and include free access to some of the expected iCloud features and services as an added incentive for Mac users to […]
The last thing we need is a free AD supported Mobile Me. Like it or not Apple does an excellent job of keeping it’s mail services and the like running and in the case of Mail free from spam.
Besides if nobody used Mobile Me we wouldn’t be seeing all of those .me.com e-mail addresses.
If they want people to actually use it, it should be free. Nobody uses MobileMe because it doesn’t offer enough to be worth $99, not even close. Look at DropBox, Pandora, Spotify, and other cloud services, they’re free or very cheap to use. It has to follow this model or it won’t matter how exciting the feature list is, nobody will use it.