Confused about iCloud

Hey dudes,

So I don't really get iCloud. I'm excited about it, but only because Apple are good at making me feel that way. I don't actually understand how it will work.

One concern of mine, after looking at the little animation on iCloud.com, is that all of the music I buy on iTunes will be instantly downloaded onto all of my iDevices. Is that right? The following statement definitely makes it sound that way:

"iCloud stores your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more. And wirelessly pushes them to all your devices — automatically".

That's gonna chew through my data like nuts! My phone data is capped at 2GB, and I'm charged exorbitant prices for every kb after that 2GB. Or is does it only "wirelessly push them" to my iDevices when connected to Wifi? Or is "push" just a weird way of saying "download upon request"? Or is there something I'm not getting?

Your help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

We don't know exactly how it works yet. No one that can talk about it has iOS 5 yet. Have read that you'll be able to turn it off though. Am sure we'll get more news the closer we get to the actual release of iOS5 in the fall.

Plus, consider how much of that stuff do you really do when your iDevice is not connected via wifi.

I upgraded some previous music purchases to iTunes+format last week shortly after upgrading iTunes to 10.3. Shortly after the music download started I got a push notification on both iPhone and iPad about the download.

Like the OP I too have data plan limits. All I had to do was go to settings and choose Store. From there I could control whether downloads were off or on for both music and apps or turn off the option to download purchases via cellular network. I assume the cloud will behave similarly.

I'm hoping that there at least is an option to push music only via wi-fi. If not, I won't be using that feature. It'll be just too easy to chew right through these limited data plans otherwise.

I updated quite a bit of music a couple of days ago to the iTunes Plus format. I did the update from my Mac. When I got the push notification on mu iPhone and iPad I was worried about my data plan as well.

The good news is that you can control how this feature behaves. On your iPhone/iPad go to settings. Fron there choose Store and you can choose whether to update music or Apps. There is also a Cellular option there which when set to off seems to result in updates only occurring when you are on wi-fi. I assume the cloud will behave similarly.

Mods feel free to delete this post since it essentially repeats my previous post. . I was typing in another window and did not realize I reposted here. I had intended to post this elsewhere

I have iOS 5 and Looked into this for you.

Removed.

Just a reminder for discussions related to iOS 5.