With the recent announcement of iCloud, Apple joins Google, Amazon and Microsoft in their aggressive push into cloud computing, in a race to reel customers into their media ecosystems.
The general idea of the "cloud" is to store your media on the internet so you can access it from any device anywhere, as opposed to leaving it on a hard drive. Now with cloud services, we can juggle around our data between multiple gadgets.
Have music on your PC that you want to listen to on your smartphone? Boom, stream it from the cloud. Want to access a document on another computer? Bam, grab it from your web-connected "cloud" drive. Ideally, with cloud services you can access other types of media, such as photos, e-books and videos, across multiple devices, too.
But cloud services vary between companies so much that the buzzword can get awfully confusing. What exactly do you get? Is it just online storage? Or is it streaming media? Both? In the chart below, we give a side-by-side comparison of five major cloud services, in terms of features, device compatibility and storage space.
Pretty complicated differences, right? For further clarity, here's what you need to know about how each service works.
iCloud
Apple designed its iCloud service to work as if it were invisible. Snap a photo on your iPhone and it pops up on your Mac or Windows PC. Edit a document in the Pages app on a Mac, and that same edit appears on the Pages app on your iPhone. Buy a song on iTunes on your Mac, and on your iPhone you can re-download it; same with e-books you buy through iBooks.
Additionally, iCloud enables automatic wireless backups for iOS devices. Each Apple customer gets 5 GB of free space for backups, documents and e-mail; the photos, music and books don't count toward the 5 GB.
Apple has left some questions unanswered as to whether iCloud will have a web app interface for accessing these services from any device with a browser, like MobileMe did. However, we believe it's shortsighted to think that iCloud would not eventually have a web app suite to complement the aforementioned services.
Amazon
Amazon's Cloud Drive is as straightforward as a cloud service gets: It's just an online storage locker. You put files in there, and they're online. You can access the files from any device that supports Flash. (That means Cloud Drive is useless for any iPhone or iPad customer, since the devices do not support Flash.) Sign up for a Cloud Drive and you get 5 GB for free; you can pay an extra $1 per extra gigabyte each year.
Google's "cloud" suite can be confusing: There's no one-stop destination that hosts all your media. You have to go to Picasa to deal with your photos, Gmail for your e-mail, Music Beta for online music storage and Google Docs for your documents. Each service offers at least 1 GB of free space, and you can plunk down an extra $5 per year to add 20 gigs for most of its services. You can rent up to 16 TB each year for $4,000 (you know, in case you're trying to boot up Skynet).
Microsoft Windows Live
Like Amazon's Cloud Drive, Microsoft's Windows Live service includes SkyDrive, a cloud storage service that's simple but generous. You get 25 GB free, and that's all you can have — no options to expand. You can throw whatever file you want into the SkyDrive.
SkyDrive has some nifty integration with Windows Phone 7. Snap a photo or shoot a video on your Windows phone, and it goes straight to the SkyDrive.
Other than SkyDrive, Microsoft's Windows Live has a suite of web apps for creating and editing Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets. All these services are free.
Dropbox
Last but not least, there's Dropbox, the hottest cloud solution in the startup world. It's basically a web-connected folder that lives on your PC or smartphone. Toss any file in your Dropbox on your PC, and it appears in the Dropbox app on the iPhone. Make an edit to a file, and the changes synchronize across all your devices connected to Dropbox. The Dropbox client works the same on every major platform – Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android – and you can also access your files through the Dropbox web interface on any device with a web browser.
Sign up and you get 2 GB free; you can upgrade to up to 50 gigs for $100 per year or 100 gigs for $200 per year.
Bottom line
In summary, Microsoft's Windows Live is the most generous offer for the price of zero, but it's limited in flexibility, and you'd have to have a Windows Phone 7 device to get the photo-sharing service. Google offers the most flexibility in terms of options to expand — though it's unlikely you'll ever need 16 TB of space — and its cloud offerings are fragmented into separate services, rather than one tidy ecosystem. Dropbox has the most seamless experience that works consistently across every major platform (Mac, Windows, Linux and iOS), but it's also the most expensive option at $2 per gig. Amazon's Cloud Drive is a simple online storage locker with 5 gigs of free space, charging $1 per extra gig — but you need Adobe Flash, meaning iOS customers are out of luck. Finally, iCloud offers 5 gigs of free space, too, but most of the neat features are exclusive to iOS and Mac customers.
The cloud service you choose will likely rely on the gadgets you own. For people with an iPhone and a Mac, iCloud is an elegant (and mostly exclusive) solution for tying the two experiences together. Android and Windows customers will probably find good value in Amazon's Cloud Drive, Google's cloud suite or Microsoft's Windows Live. Finally, Dropbox costs a bit more than the other services, but its cross-platform compatibility makes it ideal for people with a mix of devices, such as a Windows PC and an iPhone, or a Mac and an Android device.
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