There really wasn’t anything revolutionary about this weeks iCloud announcement from Apple, and left me feeling that this was a ‘me-too’ catch up from Apple to give it’s devote iOS users some equivalent features to what Android and Google users have been enjoying for the past few years already.
Android is clearly still ahead of the game with it’s cloud-based solution which seamlessly syncs your Android device address book and calendar with Google’s online web-based address book and calendar both which already have a great online web-based interface too – something which was not included in this version of Apple’s iCloud, and both cleanly integrated with Google’s killer web-based email, GMail. Cnet gave the nod to Google and Android in this regard, but listed many other features that said put iCloud ahead of the competition, but I still don’t see it. Other than the ability to sync music to the cloud without actually performing an upload (put only songs’ you’ve already purchased via iTunes, which for some users will be less than useful), this was very much a catch-up release just to keep Apple in the game. It’s interesting really since MobileMe could have been everything that Google’s cloud based services already is, but maybe the timing wasn’t right, and at the time the $99 price definitely was not right – Apple acknowledged this and dropped the price for iCloud.
So is there anything compelling that would make me move from using Google’s cloud-based services with Android to using iOS with iCloud? In summary, no.