I guess iCloud is the next best thing in the Apple domain.  Man this service has changes so many names over the years; iTools in 2000, .Mac (dot Mac) in 2002, MobileMe in 2008 and in 2011 it's going to be iCloud.

I just got the following email from Apple regarding the service:

Dear MobileMe member,

We'd like to share some exciting news with you about iCloud — Apple’s upcoming cloud service, which stores your content and wirelessly pushes it to your devices. iCloud integrates seamlessly with your apps, so everything happens automatically. Available this fall, iCloud is free for iOS 5 and OS X Lion users.

What does this mean for you as a MobileMe member?

When you sign up for iCloud, you'll be able to keep your MobileMe email address and move your mail, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks to the new service.

Your MobileMe subscription will be automatically extended through June 30, 2012, at no additional charge. After that date, MobileMe will no longer be available.

When iCloud becomes available this fall, we will provide more details and instructions on how to make the move. In the meantime, we encourage you to learn more about iCloud.

Sincerely,

The MobileMe Team

Now the great new is that the service is free and I get a complementary year of MobileMe! I can save those $99 that I would have spent on MobileMe this coming August. Most services, like calendar, contact and bookmark syncing seem to have remained intact. Some services, like iDisk, are left up in the air.  Will apple still continue to offer iDisk as some sort of premium product? I have 8GB of stuff on iDisk which I would like to continue to use!  I suppose I could go with Dropbox, 50GB for $10/month (which is MORE storage than I actually need and more expensive than MobileMe). ZumoDrive and SugarSync seem to have better deals in terms of pricing. I suppose I could divvy up what I have on MobileMe among 3-4 free services, but it's nice to have it all in one place.

Another issue, albeit somewhat minor, are emails.  Do I get to keep my @mac.com and @me.com aliases? Or do those go away?  I don't want to have to resubscribe to all my mailing lists... I guess we will see come September.  I think over the summer I will try to migrate all of my emails from MobileMe to Gmail so I have one less thing in the fall - I can have a look and see which mailing-lists I really follow and resubscribe there using gmail.

What's your plan?