iCloud goes live get ready for lift off!

The Gadget Show  Wednesday 12 October 2011

Apple has opened up the web front end to iCloud, allowing eager beaver Apple users to have a look around in advance of iOS 5’s official launch later today.

There isn’t much to see if you log in to www.iCloud.com using your Apple ID – a row of nice big icons for Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Find My iPhone and iWork occupy most of the screen, but at time of writing only Find My iPhone is not greyed out. Clicking it take you to a redesigned Find My iPhone page that looks like a map (with bent corners!) laid out on a wood-effect desktop. The effect is curiously retro, like something you would find on a Lucasarts adventure game.

The other icons are greyed out, but clickable – each will pop up a dialog box advising you to upgrade to iOS 5. At teh top of the page there is another dialog that looks like an iOS 5 notification, containing a link to a ‘how to upgrade’ page. Unusually for the detail-focused Apple, the link is broken.

iOS 5 goes live later today and will fully integrate into iCloud, quietly synching your Calendar, Contacts and other data between all your iOS 5 devices and computers running Mac OS X Lion. Windows support should arrive via a new version of iTunes.

As well as synching data between devices, iCloud will partially remove the need to tether you iPhone or iPad with a PC or Mac for backups. You will still need to synch with iTunes to manage your media library, but backups will now happen automatically to the cloud and iCloud will (in theory) make restoring data to a replacement phone a zero-effort process.