One of the important buzz words of the year is still “cloud”. Meaning, to store your data in the cloud. Out there, up there, down there, wherever the servers might be located now a days. It’s also pretty clever, you get access to your data whenever, wherever, without having to use your own computer.
The ability to always have access to everything you need, pictures, movies, contacts, calender and so on, is the vision behind icloud, which provides you with a free operating system in the cloud. All you need is a web browser.
You get a Windows (Vista)-looking desktop, so you should feel at ease in icloud pretty fast. You can use Messenger, e-mail, calender, manage documents, watch video and edit pictures – all within a single browser window.
However, icloud is still in beta and only works acceptable with Internet Explorer. They claim to have a version available for Firefox too, but I couldn’t get it to work. You currently get 3GB worth of online storage space for free a long with a free e-mail address, @icloud.com
What about backup? That’s all taken care of as well, automatically. So you don’t have to worry about loosing all your data if the hard drive crashes.
It’s exciting to see how all those cloud operating systems will work out. I’m definitely not ready to give up on Leopard (and Snow Leopard, soon) just to use a web based operating system. Google is also coming out with Google Wave later on.
As mentioned, it’s currently free to register with icloud.com and try it. Watch the video below for a short introduction and then give it a try if you want to check it out.