It would seem that this guy has never actually used more than one Android device.<p>Cause Android has done this from the very beginning, syncing data and apps through your Google account. Which is free.<p>Indeed it has been awesome. When I turned on the Samsung galaxy 10.1 I got at I/O this year, it already knew my wpa key. That was just the latest in a series of small touches that have gone completely unnoticed by those living deep within the apple ecosystem.
Quote - " Who wants to go back to emailing documents to yourself, or firing up Dropbox to move media from one device to another, when iCloud will–if it works properly–obviate the need for both by enabling change-on-one-device, update-to-all computing that’s ostensibly effortless and invisible?"<p>" Add to that a price point of free and a software-driven ecosystem like the one Apple’s developed and, well, that’s an offer not easily refused. Not easily duplicated, either–particularly for more fragmented platforms like Android"<p>Hmm. Never used Android before or just paying it back Mr. Writer? Apple patted him in the back and John is just doing his best in response. WSJ is Apple's guerilla marketing arm.
It just seems to me that companies like SugarSync (and maybe Dropbox - I don't use it) have been doing this for years. I'm confident that Apple will improve some of the media streaming experience, but their real genius is in marketing these products b/c this has existed for some time.
It's true; iCloud has the potential to be a massive lock-in mechanism, ensuring that people will continue to buy Apple devices for years on end because buying anything else will mean manually moving your data out of iCloud - which probably won't be easy for the average user.
Does anybody else think that the EU is going to jump on Apple eventually the same way they jumped on Microsoft and browsers and make Apple provide a way for users to select which storage provider they want to use?