APPLE INTRODUCES iCLOUD, REPLACING MOBILEME

Apple today introduced iCloud, a breakthrough set of free new cloud services that work seamlessly with applications on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac or PC to automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and automatically and wirelessly push it to all your devices. When anything changes on one of your devices, all of your devices are wirelessly updated almost instantly.

“Today it is a real hassle and very frustrating to keep all your information and content up-to-date across all your devices,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iCloud keeps your important information and content up to date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t even need to think about it—it all just works.”

The free iCloud services include:

The former MobileMe® services—Contacts, Calendar and Mail—all completely re-architected and rewritten to work seamlessly with iCloud. Users can share calendars with friends and family, and the ad-free push Mail account is hosted at me.com. Your inbox and mailboxes are kept up-to-date across all your iOS devices and computers.

The App Store™ and iBookstore℠ now download purchased iOS apps and books to all your devices, not just the device they were purchased on. In addition, the App Store and iBookstore now let you see your purchase history, and simply tapping the iCloud icon will download any apps and books to any iOS device (up to 10 devices) at no additional cost.

iCloud Backup automatically and securely backs up your iOS devices to iCloud daily over Wi-Fi when you charge your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Backed up content includes purchased music, apps and books, Camera Roll (photos and videos), device settings and app data. If you replace your iOS device, just enter your Apple ID and password during setup and iCloud restores your new device.

iCloud Storage seamlessly stores all documents created using iCloud Storage APIs, and automatically pushes them to all your devices. When you change a document on any device, iCloud automatically pushes the changes to all your devices. Apple’s Pages®, Numbers® and Keynote® apps already take advantage of iCloud Storage. Users get up to 5GB of free storage for their mail, documents and backup—which is more amazing since the storage for music, apps and books purchased from Apple, and the storage required by Photo Stream doesn’t count towards this 5GB total. Users will be able to buy even more storage, with details announced when iCloud ships this fall.

iCloud’s innovative Photo Stream service automatically uploads the photos you take or import on any of your devices and wirelessly pushes them to all your devices and computers. So you can use your iPhone to take a dozen photos of your friends during the afternoon baseball game, and they will be ready to share with the entire group on your iPad (or even Apple TV®) when you return home. Photo Stream is built into the photo apps on all iOS devices, iPhoto® on Macs, and saved to the Pictures folder on a PC. To save space, the last 1,000 photos are stored on each device so they can be viewed or moved to an album to save forever. Macs and PCs will store all photos from the Photo Stream, since they have more storage. iCloud will store each photo in the cloud for 30 days, which is plenty of time to connect your devices to iCloud and automatically download the latest photos from Photo Stream via Wi-Fi.

iTunes® in the Cloud lets you download your previously purchased iTunes music to all your iOS devices at no additional cost, and new music purchases can be downloaded automatically to all your devices. In addition, music not purchased from iTunes can gain the same benefits by using iTunes Match, a service that replaces your music with a 256 kbps AAC DRM-free version if we can match it to the over 18 million songs in the iTunes Store®, it makes the matched music available in minutes (instead of weeks to upload your entire music library), and uploads only the small percentage of unmatched music. iTunes Match will be available this fall for a $24.99 annual fee. Apple today is releasing a free beta version of iTunes in the Cloud, without iTunes Match, for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users running iOS 4.3. iTunes in the Cloud will support all iPhones that iOS 5 supports this fall.

Apple is ready to ramp iCloud in its three data centers, including the third recently completed in Maiden, NC. Apple has invested over $500 million in its Maiden data center to support the expected customer demand for the free iCloud services.

Pricing & Availability
The iCloud beta and Cloud Storage APIs are available immediately to iOS and Mac Developer Program members at developer.apple.com. iCloud will be available this fall concurrent with iOS 5. Users can sign up for iCloud for free on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch running iOS 5 or a Mac running Mac OS® X Lion with a valid Apple ID. iCloud includes 5GB of free cloud storage for Mail, Document Storage and Backup. Purchased music, apps, books and Photo Stream do not count against the storage limit. iTunes Match will be available for $24.99 per year (US only).

FIREFOX 4 LAUNCHED TODAY

Mozilla has today officially launched the final version of Firefox 4 and with it brought some of the biggest changes to the Firefox web browser for quite some time.

Lets start with the new interface which has been completely redesigned to get out of your way. In reality that means more screen real estate for web pages, and more functionality hidden away behind buttons.

Tabs now appear by default above the address bar and therefore take up less space as they sit where the window bar used to be. To the left of your tabs is a Firefox button which hides many of the links and menus you’d find on the typical menu bar, which is also missing from the default interface. On the far right is a small Bookmarks button giving access to the usual list of links, and above that is a Home button.The layout can be changed to make it more like Firefox 3.x though, but in general this layout does seem to be a progression we as users should embrace as it frees up the screen.

One of the major improvements Firefox 4 introduces is something called Tab Groups (formerly Tab Candy and also referred to as Panorama). This is going to please anyone who gets frustrated managing lots of tabs all the time, and something we have previewed before. Basically, it allows you to assign each tab a group, then Firefox will only display the tabs in an active group on the tab bar (think of it like having multiple desktop views, but within your browser). If you want to see tabs in another group you simply click the Tab Group icon which brings up the groups, and select the tab you want. You can also right-click a tab and move it to a group. Once you’ve used this organization feature a few times you’ll wonder how you coped without it.

While you’re exploring this new found tab paradise you may also notice web pages rendering faster. That’s the new JavaScript engine which is touted as being up to 6x faster than that used in Firefox 3.x. Staying with performance features there’s also WebGL support for 3D on the web, and hardware acceleration taking advantage of OpenGL, Direct2D and Direct3D on your machine’s GPU. There’s also crash protection in case a plug-in like Flash dies so as to not crash the whole browser.

Mozilla has also taken on board the fact we don’t just use one point of access for the web anymore. You may have a main PC, netbook, smartphone, and tablet. The Sync features allows the same Firefox experience to be accessed across multiple devices. So you get all your bookmarks, passwords, history, and even open tabs automatically fed to each device.

There’s also a bunch of new security and personalization features to help make the upgrade to Firefox 4 compelling.

Firefox 4 is available now as a 12MB download which will act as both a new install or an upgrade. I can confirm that all your bookmarks and preferences seem to be carried over to the new browser, but it’s worth doing a backup of your bookmarks anyway before doing the upgrade.

SONY READER APP LAUNCHES ON ANDROID

The Sony Reader app for Android, promised for December 2010 release, has finally appeared in the Android Marketplace. The app allows users, besides reading ebooks, to automatically syncs previously purchased books, and like the e-readers, it also supports ePub and PDF formats. In addition, you can easily highlight text and adjust font and brightness settings right from the page you're reading.

Sony has confirmed the app will only work with handsets that run Android 2.2 and higher, which is incredibly ironic considering most Sony Ericsson handsets are, you know, still stuck with 2.1.

The iPhone version, according to Sony, is in review by Apple and should be in the App Store soon.

XMARKS LIVES

Just in time for Halloween, popular browser syncing service Xmarks has risen from the grave like a zombie looking for brains.  Citing the power of the people Xmarks has received "numerous" offers to keep its service up and running.  In addition over 35,000 users have pledged to pay between $10 and $20 per year for the use of the service.  Xmarks explains:

The past ten days have been an amazing lesson in the power of community. Not in the “web 2.0 social graph” sense – I’m talking about old school community with users speaking up, speaking out and banding together. Thank you Xmarks users. You told the world it was simply unacceptable for our service to shut down and it worked. Thanks to your passion, Xmarks now has multiple offers from companies ready and willing to take over the service and keep making browser sync better and better!


Power to the people!!! [BGR]

XMARKS BROWSER SYNCING SERVICE CLOSING IN JANUARY

Xmarks, formerly Foxmarks, the popular free browser bookmark syncing service will close down within the next 90 days.  CTO and Co-Founder Todd Agulnick stated:

"With the emergence of competent sync features built in to Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it’s hard to see users paying for a service that they can now get for free. For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service. With that investment thesis thwarted, there is no way to pay expenses, primarily salary and hosting costs. Without the resources to keep the service going, we must shut it down."


Xmarks was founded in 2006 and started as a free service for Firefox browsers.  It expanded to other browsers in 2009 adopting the current Xmarks name. [BGR]

DROPBOX UPDATES MOBILE APPS

Dropbox the internet syncing service has updated it's mobile apps.  You can now use Dropbox on the iPhone, iPad, Android or Blackberry devices.  Dropbox also noted that there are over two million mobile users are now using Dropbox on their mobile devices and over 100 million mobile applications are using the Dropbox API. [BGR]