Experience Cloud Computing – Now!

Lots of talk about Cloud Computing – now try it out for free HERE with icloud.com.

We have all heard lots of talk about “Cloud Computing” – now you can give it a try using a new, free site called icloud. It’s so new that you can’t use Firefox yet, so I had to use IE to try it out. It’s also a tad slow as demand has probably outpaced their servers, but if you want a taste of the coming “cloud”, this is a nifty way to give it a try. The first screen is below:

The usual EULA stuff:

Then it loads up some stuff:

And then boom – your internet desktop:

There is an option to load the desktop on the full screen by pressing F11, but it did not work for me. This is the welcome splash:

Once through that, the desktop:

Here is your cloud hard drive – you get 3 GB to start:

With the desktop comes a word processor – very basic but functional:

Email – you get a *.icloud.com address:

Icloud even comes with a System Manager – starting to look a bit familiar?

Gee whiz – a Control Panel to boot:

Language support – a nice list to start; also notice the “Translate” tab – a handy feature:

As I said, don’t look to this right now for speedy response time – as a start-up it’s far from being a polished product. However, as a preview of what all this “cloud” stuff is all about, a very nice introduction. To me there are obvious issues relative to securing data, etc, which I imagine will resolve to the user’s satisfaction.

If you think about the implications for a desktop OS, I can certainly see using a Linux OS on the desktop accessing something like a “Windows Cloud OS’ – the mind boggles at the idea!