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As expected Apple jumped into the cloud-based music game yesterday when Steve Jobs announced iCloud. While I download iTunes and update my iPad to try out some of the features that are available now, here are a few thoughts on the announcements.

It’s about time that there will be iPad synching via wifi.

The mere ability to sync to the cloud is worth the cost of admission, saving space, memory and time, especially for those apps.

If you think about it the iCloud feature allowing you to access songs you bought previously is about the same as what we currently have for iOS apps, which you can delete and re-download.

All that synching addresses and email with the Cloud stuff didn’t seem revolutionary to a Gmail and Android user, though it sure excited the Apple fan boy in the office next to me. Ditto with the Twitter integration with Contacts and enhanced notifications.

iMessages the next BBM? Maybe, but a dagger in SMS, I doubt it. Sure for close friends who you know have iPhones, but if you don’t know what phone they have? There are reasons why here in the States we prefer SMS over mobile IM and email and I suspect they are the same ones that will limit the popularity of iMessages.

There sure was a lot of Twitter integration with iOS 5, but none with iTunes. Kind of a shame.

Apple’s thorough Twitter integration seems like a big middle finger to Facebook, will it appease our social media desires or just make us hungry for Facebook features throughout iOS?

I can’t find any mention of streaming in all of the iCloud and iTunes in the Cloud descriptions, just downloading to multiple devices. So just because I have uploaded 20,000 songs to iTunes in the Cloud doesn’t mean I can access them at a moment’s notice unlike Google Music. I need to download a track first before I play it. Seems like we’re still playing off the hard drive and dealing with hard drive space with this option.

TechCrunch is calling iTunes Match (where for $24.99 a year iTunes will scan your music library, identify the existing tracks that match tracks available on iTunes and give you access to them through iTunes in the Cloud) as paying “$25 a year to legalize all your content” and CNNMoney calls it “music pirates permanent amnesty.”. But before you go matching all those songs you laboriously ripped from your CD library think about the quality you ripped those songs at. I know that mine are all better than 256 kpbs so the matched tracks are actually a step down in quality.

I’ll post a deeper dive into the new iTunes features once I’ve had a chance to try them out.

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