iCloud experience so far...

[ra4oasis]

I am one off many who is considering moving my email/calendar/contacts from gmail (or yahoo/hotmail/whatever) to iCloud. I have read a lot of people either don't trust apple because they have failed in this area before, or they are having problems of they have already made the move. But is anyone NOT having problems? Although I have not moved fully from my gmail account yet, my iCloud email, calendar and contacts have been working fine from day one. I can send and receive email, calendar, contacts, and backups of my iOS devices are all working too. So far, am I the only one who isn't having issues?

 

[hafr]

I am one off many who is considering moving my email/calendar/contacts from gmail (or yahoo/hotmail/whatever) to iCloud. I have read a lot of people either don't trust apple because they have failed in this area before, or they are having problems of they have already made the move. But is anyone NOT having problems? Although I have not moved fully from my gmail account yet, my iCloud email, calendar and contacts have been working fine from day one. I can send and receive email, calendar, contacts, and backups of my iOS devices are all working too. So far, am I the only one who isn't having issues?

I had duplicates in my calendar, but that was because I synced with both iTunes and iCloud and by no longer syncing with iTunes it was solved.

iPhoto stopped syncing Photo Stream, but it was solved by deactivating then activating Photo Stream in preferences.

Mail is only pushing to the iPhone if the mail app is open, but I'm not too bothered by that.

Other than that, it's great. So all in all a very good experience.

 

[Candlelight]

I can't get in, and don't own any iOS devices so much of iClouds functions aren't going to work for me.

Not gonna use it just yet.

 

[rmcmast]

After researching I decided to keep my .me account for syncing calendars, email etc, and my gmail account for iTunes. I took the plunge tonight. It took less than 5 min to convert my MobileMe account to iCloud.

Everything seems ok so far on my MacBook Pro, iMac and various iDevices. Pages, numbers and keynote are working with documents, but I hope the corresponding Mac apps get updated soon to use iCloud directly.

So far so good.

-- Rick

 

[ra4oasis]

Honestly I expected more poll results to be bad experiences overall. Maybe I will take the plunge this week...

 

[ntrigue]

After researching I decided to keep my .me account for syncing calendars, email etc, and my gmail account for iTunes. I took the plunge tonight. It took less than 5 min to convert my MobileMe account to iCloud.

Everything seems ok so far on my MacBook Pro, iMac and various iDevices. Pages, numbers and keynote are working with documents, but I hope the corresponding Mac apps get updated soon to use iCloud directly.

So far so good.

-- Rick

Same thing on my end. Reason is my family shares iTunes but wants unique iCloud syncs.

 

[whsbuss]

The most annoying problem is with iCloud mail. When reading email online or via MBP mail, the badge for mail never updates on the iDevice until you open the mail.app

You would think Apple fixed this since it was the same way on MobileMe. For now staying with google.

 

[hafr]

Honestly I expected more poll results to be bad experiences overall. Maybe I will take the plunge this week...

Probably because people are more likely to start threads because they've experienced trouble than if everything is working or the minor problems they've had have already been answered a hundred times

Seriously, this forum has been nothing but a repeat of the same three or four problems since the release, and many of them do seem to be a bit dense. Especially those who bash iCloud, calling it useless and so on - and then saying something like "dropbox is a better option"...

 

[ra4oasis]

I haven't moved my emails to iCloud yet, but Calendars and Contacts couldn't have worked better. Making the move with email stuff takes a little longer. We'll see if I do it over the next few weeks.

 

[nebo1ss]

I am using Icloud for contacts and calenders. Can see no need to move email there since my gmail accounts already push to all my IOS devices and entourage on my macbook Pro.

 

[Elven]

Given all the issues and that I personally can not take any downtime at this current time, I'm only using iCloud for the track my iPad/iPhone module.

 

[whsbuss]

Staying w/Google for now. Two big issues for me is unread sync on email @me.com and iCloud calendar sharing on Google.

 

[vitzr]

I've had such excellent experiences with Google there's nothing that can pull me away. Dropbox and Evernote are also a part of my cloud strategy and have been reliable for years.

Yet my wife is the more typical user, and decided to use iCloud. She's wasted so much time dealing with problems it's made her realize why I have chosen to avoid it. Now she too has returned to Google.

It's a hard lesson to experience as it wastes so much time. That said I'm
confident millions will be drawn in unwittingly and never know the difference.

Apple as usual will be the big winner as people end up paying after they see that in the default setup you're only left with less than 1GB after the initial setup. Their will be millions paying for iCloud.

 

[gazzrenn]

I normally sync my contacts with our corporate exchange server. I've done this for over 7 years through various phones (it's always nice never having to put on Facebook "I've lost my phone and my contacts, please send me your numbers!")

I decided today to stop my iPhone syncing contacts from exchange, and move them into iCloud.

The reasons for this were twofold.

1. There are certain contact fields which are used by Siri which do not exist in an Outlook / Exchange contact and will/can not be sync'd - Fields such as, Nickname, Home/Work address, Mother, Spouse etc. Not having this info makes Siri 'forget' who my mother is. This is not the case with the same contact living in iCloud. So iCloud has 'fixed' Siri.

2. There is zero point in my having a shiny new iCloud account and @me.com address if i'm not going to try and use it!

Ultimately, I intend to move away from gmail for my non-work emails and use my @me.com address.... my calendar will unfortunately always have to live in our Exchange server.

If it all goes wrong, I'll report back!

 

[some-dude]

I use iCloud for the iCal and Address Book sync, and I've stuck a bunch of Word and PPT documents on it so I can quick reference them on my iPhone. The only issue I had was the appointments in iCal being doubled, and I had that problem solved by disabling "On my Mac".

I don't use iCloud to backup my iPhone. I figure that feature is more for people who have iOS only (no lap/desktop) and for myself I'd rather not have to download data that I can store locally in the event that I do need to restore my phone.

I haven't done much with the @me account beyond sending a couple of test emails to verify it worked. I enabled Push in my iPhone's settings and it seems to function just fine. When I send tests off my laptop from another account it takes around 4-5 seconds for a simple email to arrive at my phone and it updates the number on the icon.

I'll probably start making more use of it shortly as @me.com is way easier to communicate to people than the 15 character, twisted jumble of letters my current ISP uses.

The only thing I wish that iCloud had was a Dropbox style functionality so that I could upload and share specific files. But... I already have Dropbox for that so it's not like I'm missing out.

 

[scarred]

It's ok. Since I have an Android in the mix, I had to keep some some stuff on Google sync.

I guess for me anyways, it comes down to a trust being earned thing. Can I trust this new technology to not lose my stuff? With my Android phone, I just gave it my gmail account and everything worked and continued working (for a year now). iCloud didn't give me that warm and fuzziness out of the gate.

Photo stream is probably the nicest feature for me, but is awfully random. 30 days of pictures? Automatically removed?? That certainly doesn't make me want to trust it with or for anything.

 

[hafr]

Photo stream is probably the nicest feature for me, but is awfully random. 30 days of pictures? Automatically removed?? That certainly doesn't make me want to trust it with or for anything.

What is it that you think is random, and why don't you want to trust it with anything? I wonder if you understand what photo stream actually is.