San Francisco – Apple (NASD: AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs took the stage in San Francisco today at the company’s annual developers conference to unveil iCloud, a new cloud-based music and media storage service, as well as OS X Lion, and the next iteration of its mobile operating system, iOS 5, according to CNET’s live blog coverage of the event.
The iCloud service includes a feature called “iTunes Match,” which for $24.99 per year will let users “scan and match” songs in their own personal music libraries, and then stream these tracks from the cloud to any iOS device.
iCloud also lets users re-download any previously purchased albums and songs for free, and sync those tracks to other devices.
In addition to the music service, iCloud will play host to documents, photos and e-books, as well as data from Calendar, Mail and Contacts apps, and automatically push updates to all a user’s devices.
Scheduled for release in the fall, iOS 5 will offer over-the-air software updates, which implement only new changes rather than re-loading the entire application.
A new application called iMessage, which runs across all iOS devices, will provide delivery and read receipts similar to the BlackBerry BBM service.
Apple said it has sold 200 million iOS devices sold to date, including 25 million iPads in the device’s first 14 months on sale, as well as 15 billion songs from its iTunes Store.
To date, Apple has paid out more than $2.5 billion to iOS application developers.
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http://tinyurl.com/3whxgzo (CNET)
