With a population of over 250,000 students, there’s no denying that Boston is a college town. And just one look at almost any article here on BostInno will tell you that Boston’s home to a pretty tech savvy crowd, too. With that in mind, it’s worth taking a look at how iCloud, Apple’s (AAPL) “next big thing,” may make the lives of Boston’s tech-obsessed college students just a little easier. iCloud is Apple’s attempt to make taking advantage of all the benefits of cloud computing as effortless and automatic as possible. The service is slated to make its debut next month alongside the release of the much-anticipated iPhone 5. With more college students than ever toting around MacBooks, iPhones, and iPads, iCloud has the potential to tie everything together and be a drop-dead simple way to keep students’ crazily busy digital lives in sync.
Everything, Everywhere, Automatically
When your schedule is chock full of everything from classes and internships to club meetings and parties, you can’t afford to miss a beat. Your phone’s contacts hold info ranging from your professor’s email address to the number of that girl you met Thursday night at the bar. Your calendar, contacts, and email are important, and you want to be able to access them whether you’re on your phone, your laptop, or even your iPad. This is where iCloud could be huge. The instant you add a meeting with your professor to the calendar on your Mac, it’s pushed up into the “cloud” and automatically sent down to your iPhone and your iPad. Same goes for contacts: you meet a potential employer at a networking event and put their contact information into your iPhone right away. Even if you lose your phone on the way back to campus, you’ll still have that vital information since it was instantly synced online back to your Mac and iPad you left in your room. Of course, your email is always available everywhere too, so with iCloud you’ll never be out of sync.
Calling for Backup
Backing up your information is kind of like doing your laundry: you know you should really do it before things get too messy, but you put it off and put it off until you’ve got a crisis on your hands. Apple seems to understand the problem and has included a simple solution in iCloud. When you activate iCloud on your iPhone or iPad, you’ll never have to worry about backup again. Why? Because it’s automatic. Once per day when you’re connected to WiFi, iCloud will silently back up your entire iPhone and iPad to the cloud. Your music, photos, videos, calendar, contacts, emails, texts, apps, and settings are saved securely online every night without you having to do a thing. So not only will you never again have to spam all your Facebook friends with an annoying “Lost Phone – Need Numbers!” group invitation, but any time you get a new iDevice, you can use iCloud’s automatic backups to instantly restore everything to how it was before. No longer does having an entire beer spilled on your iPhone mean you have to start from scratch—iCloud’s got your back.
Documents in the Cloud
Apple’s iCloud promises to be all about making it effortless for users to tap into the benefits of cloud computing. One major iCloud feature that could be huge for students is called Documents in the Cloud. All college students have to write papers and create presentations, and if you use Apple’s iWork productivity suite, then iCloud could change the way you work. Consider this: you’re working on a Keynote presentation on your Mac for a class the night before it’s due. The next day you head to class ready to give your presentation, but then you realize that *gasp* you forgot your laptop. iCloud to the rescue. You pull out your iPhone, fire up the Keynote app, open your presentation (from the cloud), make a few last minute edits, hook up your phone to the projector, and end up acing your final presentation. iCloud’s Documents in the Cloud feature keeps your documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in sync across your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Apple promises that it will be easy for app makers to put this same sort of iCoud integration into their own apps, so you can enjoy the benefits in non-Apple apps as well.
Music: Your “Get Out of Jail Free” Card
Odds are that every student in Boston has a huge music collection in iTunes. And everyone wants to be able to listen to their music whenever, wherever they want. This is where the “iTunes in the Cloud” feature of iCloud steps in. When you buy a song from iTunes on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, that track is immediately and automatically loaded onto all of your other devices so you have it everywhere right away. For songs you’ve already purchased on iTunes, you can use iCloud to download them wirelessly on any device with one click. Sounds easy, but what about all the songs you didn’t buy from iTunes? Maybe you ripped some from CDs or somehow otherwise—ahem—“acquired” them online. Apple’s introducing a sort of “get out of jail free/for $24.99” card so you can have the same sort of instant anywhere access to all of your songs you didn’t buy on iTunes. iTunes Match, which will cost $24.99 per year (that’s just around 2 cases of beer, kids), will scan your library and give you one-click access to your songs on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Apple will even give you higher bit-rate versions of those questionably acquired songs, so the horrible quality tracks you may have pulled from YouTube will suddenly sound like actual music. iTunes Match, which is completely optional, is the only portion of iCloud that costs money. But for students with thousands of tracks, $25 may be worth it for an instant library of 100% legitimized music.
Cloud Computing that “Just Works”
When Steve Jobs first introduced iCloud back in June, he repeated one expression over and over again: “it just works.” The potential power in iCloud is that in order for students (and anyone, really) to take advantage of all its features, they don’t have to know a thing about “the cloud.” Features like calendar sync, wireless backups, Documents in the Cloud, and even Photo Stream (basically Documents in the Cloud, but for photos) all happen invisibly in the background. It just works because there’s no way you can mess it up. Sure services like Google Calendar, Dropbox, and even Spotify can provide similar feature sets, but the thing is that people need to know to seek out these services. By virtue of the fact that iCloud will be built into any iPhone or iPad running iOS 5, millions of people will be using it without even knowing it. Of course it remains to be seen how iCloud will hold up once it’s released next month, but if the huge popularity of Apple gadgets on this city’s college campuses is any indication, iCloud should prove to be a welcome new feature for students all around Boston.
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