Along with iOS 5 Apple is making a huge push towards the cloud. iCloud is Apple’s solution to bring all your apps, mails, photos etc to one place, synced to all your iOS devices over the air. While iCloud sounded like a great idea, we were puzzled. There were a couple of things that hit us.
To begin with we didn’t knew if there would be a web version of iCloud that would allow you to access emails, photos and other things via a browser. Just having them on an iOS device doesn’t make sense. Apple clarified that sometime back and we know that there would be an online presence of iCloud, that would replace MobileMe. The other query was on the storage space.
During the iCloud announcement, Apple promised 5GB of free storage space, but said nothing about additional space. Today Apple opened up iCloud.com Beta for developers and thus gave a preview of what is coming up. Along with this, what has leaked out is the pricing for iCloud. Apple offers you to choose 10/20 & 50GB upgrades.
iCloud Extra Storage
Apple charges $20 / year for additional 10 GB of storage, taking the total to 15GB, $40 for additional 20GB a year and $100 for 50GB extra storage. Compare this to well…
Google Plans:
Google on the flip side charges $5 for 20GB (total storage), and just $20 for 80GB storage. This sure beats Google by a huge margin, showcasing Google’s cloud muscle. We would expect Apple to give more than 50GB and at better rates in future, but for now, Google takes the crown.