Apple’s iCloud.com goes live
Ahead of a full release this fall, Apple has pushed the Web front end to iCloud live for developers to kick the tires on.
The new site, which resides at iCloud.com, features a similar front-end to Me.com, which will be shuttered next year with Apple’s MobileMe service. Visitors can view Web e-mail, manage contacts, view and edit calendar events, and access the Find My iPhone tool. A new entrant to the bunch is a Web app for iWork, which outlines iCloud’s file storage for documents created in Apple’s Keynote, Pages and Numbers iOS applications.
Though users can upload up to 5GB of data for free, after that they have to pay, and Apple has announced its prices. For $20 per year, you get 10GB of storage; 20GB is $40 per year, and 50GB is $100 per year. According to tech blog MacRumors, “purchased music, apps, and Photo Stream” do not count against your free 5GB. Amazon, which launched its own cloud music service earlier this year, cut prices for its music storage service ahead of the launch of iCloud and iTunes Match, according to All Things D.
iCloud will launch out of Beta to non-developer users in the fall, alongside the updated iOS 5according to MacRumors. There is no word yet on iTunes Match, the $25 per year service that syncs all of your music into the cloud, which was announced along with iCloud at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2011. The Apple site still says that Match is “coming this fall.”