Apple today officially announced the public release of its iCloud service. Introduced in June at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, iCloud is a free online service for iOS and OS X users providing support for mail, calendar, contacts, photos, documents and more.
Specific features include push Contacts, Calendar and Mail similar to the company’s soon-to-be-discontinued MobileMe service along with several new features: Photostream for syncing photos between iOS devices and desktop computers, storage and synchronization of documents across multiple devices and online backups of iOS device settings and data to the cloud. iCloud requires iOS 5 or OS X 10.7.2 and will be available for sign-up on October 12th.
Each iCloud account includes 5GB of free online storage; users can choose to purchase additional storage at annual rates of $20 for 10GB, $40 for 20GB or $100 for 50GB.
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