Today I got an email from Mobileme talking about Apple's new Icloud service. Since I'm not a big Apple geek I haven't heard of it yet and clicked through to Apples website to find out more information. I must say that I am pretty impressed. This new service seems like it's going to be really cool. Here is what I found out:

What is Apple Icloud?

Icloud is going to be a service Apple provides to iOS5 and OS X Lion users. Basically, what it will do is sync all of the content on all of your devices wirelessly. This includes pictures, apps, music, documents, books, contacts, calendars and mail. This mean if you buy an app on your iphone, your ipad and imac will have it synced automatically and it will be on your ipad and imac when you get home. Now you no longer have to sync your devics yourself!

Icloud also comes with 5GB of free storage. The apps, music, books, and your photostream will not reduce the amount of storage you have.

One note about music though. You can only store music that you have purchased in itunes for free. They will let you store music you've purchase elsewhere or ripped from CDs but you have to pay $24.99 per year to store your songs. However, whether you have 5,000 songs or 20,000 songs the price will be the same.

Any apps that you have previously purchased you can download to your other devices free of charge. When you purchase new apps you can have icloud push it to all of your devices.

One of the things I read over and read over is about how there is no synching and no management required. Basically, it operates in the background. They even mentioned at one point that if you had a document that you were working on you don't even have to save the document because Icloud is automatically backing it up.

With all this backing up you might be wondering if it's going to slow down the performance of your devices. That does not appear to be the case. Icloud will do a daily backup of your devices. However, it's only going to back up the changes you have made vs. backing up everything from scratch. This will minimize the impact that the backing up will have on your devices performance.

Unfortunately, I don't think I will be able to use it on my iphone. I'm still rocking the original iphone. It's probably time for me to upgrade.