Analysis: On Day One, iCloud Gets An Incomplete

Those seeking to upgrade also complained about finding out the hard way that iCloud isn’t supported by pre-Mac OS X Lion versions of the operating system (which Apple made clear in its systems requirements information), as well as problems simply upgrading accounts for more storage.

Here’s what we saw:

Apple has different upgrade processes for Windows PCs (Windows Vista SP1 and up), for Macs with OS X Lion and for iOS 5-based devices. Even after upgrading devices to iOS 5 and signing into iCloud, issues emerged that hadn’t been expected. For example: Over-the-air backups of an iPhone 4 to iCloud couldn’t happen, because Apple told us our iPhone contained more than the 5 GB of data that it stores for free. But when we tried to upgrade to more storage through our iTunes account, we were unable to get through to Apple’s transaction servers to complete the upgrade.

Additionally, Apple’s rules for moving some – but not all - data from MobileMe to iCloud had many taking to Twitter or other services to express frustration at its complicated nature.

Other aspects of iCloud have actually been working well for several weeks, such as the ability to buy a song through iTunes on your iPhone, and then, over iCloud, downloading that same song to your iPad.

We’ll need more time to get a fuller look at iCloud and its’ power and performance. Certainly, difficulty in reaching its transaction servers is not a great sign for, say, being able to access your data folder to get that PowerPoint at the last second before a meeting.