Apple won't turn on its full iCloud online service till the fall, but there's already one piece of the puzzle in place: iTunes in the Cloud. Well, most of it, anyway: the iTunes Match service, which lets users upload music not purchased through iTunes, won't be available until the release of iOS 5 and the rest of iCloud. What's in operation now works on AT&T iPhones and other iOS 4.3 devices—iPads, iPod touches as well as the AT&T iPhone 4 and 3GS. On the desktop (both Mac and Windows), the new iTunes 10.3, available as of last night, includes what it calls iTunes in the Cloud Beta.
iTunes in the Cloud on iOS
Soon after the WWDC address by CEO Steve Jobs, the change was slipstreamed into the iTunes store and iBook Store on iOS 4.3 devices: Without updating or installing anything, a new "Purchased" button will appear at the bottom of your iOS device's iTunes and iBooks app—unless you have a Verizon iPhone—that'll come later. Tapping on this brings up a page where you can see either "All" purchased music or "Not on this phone" or "Not on this iPad." The latter are the tunes you've bought on other devices.
To the right of each song in the list, you'll see a corresponding little cloud icon. Tapping on this will download the song to the current device. As you might expect, on the iPad, the layout is more spacious, with a sidebar showing the performer and a list of their songs on the right. All the device sizes—iPhone, iPad, and iTunes on the desktop—also let me search within these categories.
After clicking on a "Not on this phone" song's cloud icon, I was brought to a page showing all songs on the album, with the choice to download all. I could also just click on any song's individual cloud icon; doing so causes the cloud to fly down to the Download counter at bottom right. This step requires entering your Apple password. After the download is finished, the cloud icon changes to a grayed-out Downloaded button.
The iBooks version of iCloud is quite similar. On the iBook store page, a new Purchased icon appears, and touching this again brings up a page with "All" or "Not on this iPhone" views. Anything not on the present device gets the cloud icon that lets you download the book to it. Right after I did this, the app flipped back to my bookshelf, showing the newly downloaded book's cover as the first book, with a progress bar showing download progress.
On my iPhone 3GS and on an AT&T iPhone 4, I didn't see the new Purchased button in the App Store, though I did on a 1st generation iPad. This let me switch between viewing iPhone and iPad apps, and the expected All and Not on this iPad views. Each non-installed app was accompanied by the cloud icon for downloading. One bonus here was that if I had bought an iPhone app for which there was an iPad version, the latter would be installed on the tablet.
iTunes in the Cloud on the Desktop
Once you download and install iTunes 10.3, either for Mac or Windows PCs, you'll get iTunes in the Cloud Beta along for the ride. A new Purchase option now appears both in iTunes music store and on your left rail choices in iTunes. Clicking one of these brings up the Purchased page, where you can view Music, Apps, or Books. Again, options to view All or "Not in My Library" appear, as do the cloud icons next to items not loaded on the present machine.
For a moment I thought that iTunes was letting me stream songs not downloaded to my Mac, but it turned out that I could just play the 1:30 minute preview that anyone who hadn't even bought the song was allowed. Stranger still, even after I downloaded a purchased song, this 1:30 cap persisted when I hit the play button within the Purchased section. The full song, however, did play from the Music section of the iTunes library.
Apple claims that anything newly purchased will appear automatically in all your other devices signed into the same Apple ID. I tested this by buying a song and an iBook on the phone and another on the Mac running iTunes 10.3. I also checked with an iPad logged into my account. Turns out it wasn't so instant. After a half hour, I still didn't see a song purchased on the computer in either the iPhone or iPad. The same happened after I purchased a song on the iPad—it didn't show up on the other platforms even after a good wait. I guess that's why Apple is calling the service "beta." Hopefully it's not a reprise of MobileMe's birthing pains.
Clouding the Issue
iTunes in the Cloud is not actually a cloud-based service in the strictest sense: Your data and the application don't live in the cloud, the way they do with Amazon Cloud Player or Google Music. Those services actually stream your music from the cloud via a Web browser. Even the name "iTunes in the Cloud" is somewhat disingenuous, since it doesn't keep your songs only in the cloud—you have to download them to the local device. But Apple's new feature does offer a great improvement over the way iTunes has worked up until now, making getting your music, apps, or books onto any of your other devices far less bothersome.