What do you guys think of the upcoming "iCloud" and other cloud storage solutions?

I don't know much about it, but I don't care for it much either. Would much rather see major advances in memory storage on the devices and of course battery life.

 

You guys outlined some of the shortfalls very nicely. It doesn't excite me very much to be honest. Granted, I'm not the worlds biggest audiophile either... I just don't see a real place for it in my life. It seems like an extra hassle and complication that I just don't need to deal with since I already carry my entire music collection with me on my phone, and can easily plug it in anywhere I am.

It seems like more gimmic than feature to me. Plus, with the 3G data caps ATT imposes, I don't see myself streaming my own home music or video ever while on the road or away from wi fi...

 

No one really needs their entire music library with them every time they go out. I use an iPod Shuffle and manage just fine, I can shove 10 albums on and it'll last me 5-7 days or so. Amazons 20GB offer wouldn't cover my whole collection anyway, and there's no way I'm paying to listen to my music.

 

I think the whole "cloud" philosophy and way of managing data is the future, for real. It's definitely a good ways off and there's no way I'd subscribe to such a thing in the near-term, but down the road I do see this becoming the dominant way of managing everything (as creepy a nightmare as it sounds, for several reasons)

I'll expect at least 5 years will have to pass before this becomes truly trendy and gets past the inconveniences, maybe at least 10 before it becomes "the norm"

 

I'd definitely say 10 years for us here in the UK. 15 minutes from the centre of my country's capital city and my download speed is 0.6 Mbit. We're so freakin' slow it's unbelievable and no one wants to invest any money into it.

I agree though, in the long run. When I think about the cloud I usually imagine work documents before I think of music because music just seems like something people don't mind carrying around anyway. We're always gonna have a device of some sort in our pockets, but they don't usually contain .doc, .psd and the like.

 

One of the main reasons I decided to go with Amazon's cloud services (aside from that's where I buy 90% of my music from anymore), is that all those mp3's take up space. Space that is being quickly made scarce as apps and games get bigger and bigger. For me, it's worth using it if I have the extra space on my phone (or iPod Touch when I use it).

The biggest problem, as BravadoWaffle pointed out, is the data cap carriers impose. With Verizon rumored to be doing away with its "unlimited" plan this summer and going to a tiered plan, it's not really economically feasible unless your surrounded by wifi wherever you go.