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News >> Technology >>
Apple to unveil iCloud
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 01 June 2011, 19:31 IST
Bangalore: Apple, after giving such hit products like iPhone, iPad, iPod to its consumers, now Apple is coming up with a new thing to attract more people. Apple has plans to get into the cloud service which will help the users to directly create their music collection online.
Apple has signed deals with music companies like Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and EMI Group to launch an online storage service called iCloud. Apple has confirmed that CEO Steve Jobs will attend the company's annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and will discuss about the cloud services offering. In the conference Apple will also unveil its next generation software Lion, the eighth major release of Mac OS X, iOS 5 for mobile, the next version of Apple's advanced mobile operating system which powers the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.
Through this agreement, Apple consumer can directly create and listen music collection online. This process is less time consuming on transferring or uploading songs. Apple also will be able to offer additional services like music recommendations, Internet radio. For the iCloud, Apple will build a half million square foot data center in Maiden, North Carolina. However, it is still not clear that the iCloud will be a purely music streaming tool or if it will be a cloud service for storage.
Users can be able to access their music files from any Mac OS X or iOS device from streaming playback over an active WiFi or mobile network connection. The service has the ability to sync files across supported devices wirelessly.
Other companies like Amazon and Google have already launched streaming music services without industry licenses. But till now they have not managed to get big record labels on board, they can only offer streaming of tracks already owned by the user. Users have to upload separate copies of their own music files to the cloud which is very much time consuming.
However, Google's service is free, but in an invite-only beta mode and Amazon's charges a small yearly fee. Apple has not cleared anything about the cost of the service, now we have to wait and watch how much Apple is going to charge or the service will be free.