APPLE ICLOUD

Apple iCloud comes with 5GB of free storage, but it's more than just storage. Music, apps, books, and TV shows you purchase from the iTunes store, as well as your Photo Stream, can also be stored and streamed from it, and none of the purchased media counts against your storage quota.

Apple iCloud also works hand in glove with iTunes Match. Match, which is built into the iTunes app, lets you store your entire music collection, no matter where you got your tunes, for just $24.99 a year. Even if you didn't buy the music from Apple, it doesn't count against your storage limits.

In addition, Apple's iCloud gives you not just storage and an online music server, but Apple's wireless services as well. These include contact synchronization, its own email service, mobile backup, and location awareness.

That sounds great, but it can actually be very confusing, even for dedicated Apple fans like Chris Maxcer of MacNewsWorld, who found that iCloud's constant syncing of files from all his devices with full read/write permissions and an inability to tell what was on the cloud and what wasn't, had him wanting to throw his "iPhone into the street", and then to run out in traffic so he could stomp it into oblivion. I feel his pain.

Basic iCloud services are available via the web on any platform. To really use it to its full potential, you need to be running a Mac with Lion or above or an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch running iOS 5 or better. It also runs reasonably well on Windows with the latest version of iTunes. What about your Mac running Snow Leopard or an older version of Mac OS X? You're out of luck.

Additional space is priced at $20 per year for 10GB, $40 per year for 20GB, and $100 per year for 50GB.

I'd love to love iCloud. I can't. Apple has integrated iCloud into Mac OS X and iOS, but managing your files can be amazingly confusing, and Apple's integration of cloud and your local devices is far from perfect. If Apple gets it right, iCloud will be the killer app for Apple fans, but it's a long way from there.