The short answer: Yes, use it. It makes your life easier, and stuff “just works” a little bit better.
The longer answer: First, let’s assume you’ve read through the promotional site already. There is a lot of good information there, and I find that Apple talks pretty straight without a lot of hyperbole that you hear from other tech giants. Now on to my experiences…
Photo Stream – By far my favorite new iCloud feature. It isn’t so much a photo backup as an photo distribution mechanism. I take a photo on my iPhone, and it shows up on the iMac (which happens to be automatically backed up by the good folks at CrashPlan). My kids take a picture on their iPod Touch, and it automatically shows up on my iPad. No importing, and no iTunes synchronizing. It just works. If I were to criticize anything about the photo stream, I’d say it works too good and too fast. I might take three pictures of a bird in our backyard – with the intent to save only one. By the time I’ve reviewed the pictures and deleted two, all three will already have been added to the stream and sync’d out to all of the devices.
Documents in the Cloud – if you are doing work in Keynote, Pages, or Numbers, this works well between the iPhone and iPad, but unfortunately leaves the desktop out. Technically, you can go to iCloud.com and download/edit/upload a document on your desktop, but it’s klunky. This will really sing when the desktop iWork apps are iCloud-enabled. But till then, it’s not quite helpful for my workflow.
Other App data – I recently installed the Apple Store app. It figured out who I was, and linked me straight in to my account. I was able to check on my recent photo order from iPhoto with only a quick confirm of my Apple ID password. I can only assume that this was because if iCloud, and I liked it. It’s like single-sign-on, for all of your apps. And at this particular moment in history, I trust Apple more than Facebook, Twitter, or Google for single-sign-on. More apps need to use this!
Contacts – I’d been synchronizing all my contacts through Google for the last few years using their Exchange protocol. It worked well enough, except for a few small things. Home email addresses would occasionally switch to Other email addresses. Two-part names might double up: Mary Jo Johnson might change into Mary Jo Jo Johnson. … None of it horrendous, and I don’t think I ever lost data: it just got mangled from time to time. I’ve switched to iCloud for my address book storage to avoid these inconveniences. A couple weeks later: so far, so good!
Calendar – Like contacts, I recently switched my personal calendar from Google to iCloud. The Exchange sync protocol Google uses isn’t bad, it just isn’t perfect. Time will tell. It was sort of a pain to switch each appointment from one service to the other.
iOS Backup – Thus seems like a no-brainier to me. The more backups, the better! I restored from a cloud backup to my iPhone once, and it worked like a charm. The biggest surprise was that the restore process let me use the device while it was still restoring the apps.
Music Match – Haven’t tried it yet. I’m one of the early iTunes users that built some complex smart playlists and rated my entire music collection. Of my 30+GB music collection, I almost always have the 2-3GB of songs automatically on my phone that I want to listen to. It sounds like a neat service, but I’m not ready to part with $25 to try it.
Find my friends – This is both cool, and creepy. This would be better as “Find my family” because you probably won’t want too many people to know that you are not at your house at any particular time. This might work well in college or for high school students. But as a family man, few people will get added into Find my Friends.
All told, I’m hopeful for iCloud. There are a lot of good things in there, and I can’t wait for more apps to leverage it.
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