iCloud, not that great, yet.

[Akarin]

An avid consumer of Dropbox services for trivial files, I was truly extatic with the announcement of iCloud. But in my opinion, Apple didn't get it right just now. I would trust Apple for storing my sensitive, highly confidential info (I do not trust Dropbox as their core-business is files storage and don't know how much they do data-mining on hosted files) but as of now, they are not offering me a way to do it.

iWork:
I love the ability to save from iOS to iCloud but to then work from iWork on Mac OS is clunky: have to download my files from iCloud website, edit them and then publish them to iCloud manually again. If a file has not been edited on iOS device, I can't download it back.

At the moment, I only use it to start documents while on the go in Pages, when on my desktop machine, I download the file and move it to Dropbox.

Other files:
As there's no possibility to upload any files other than those from iWork, so far, it is not a Dropbox alternative.

I would like iCloud to grow into a "sync folder" type of service and am very surprised it doesn't do that. IMAP mails is nothing new, Calendar sync neither. I really don't see where iCloud innovates from already long-time existing services.

When Steve Jobs antagonized the Dropbox guys after they refused to sell and telling them they are a mere feature, all I can say is that Apple failed to provide that feature.

 

[aristobrat]

I agree with you that the "Documents in the Cloud" feature of iCloud is nowhere near becoming a DropBox replacement.

Having said that, I use the heck out of most of the other iCloud features, and have had very little problems with them:

iTunes in the Cloud (being able to download past purchases on any device, automatically having new purchases install on all devices)
Photo Stream (moving pictures around wirelessly .. love when traveling without a computer, how when I get back to the hotel or some free Wi-Fi spot, pics I took on my iPhone automatically show up on my iPad!)
Backup (it was awesome restoring my iPhone 4S at work the day I bought it, instead of having it be totally blank all day at work until I got home later that night and restored it the traditional "plug into iTunes" way).

I also use Calendar, Mail, and Contacts + Find my Friends/iPhone, but I was a previous MobilMe member I had those features before iCloud. However a bunch of my friends never had MobileMe, and iCloud is their first time getting their contacts and calendar wirelessly synced to their devices. Not that they couldn't have done that before with Google, etc, but they're not techy enough to have figured that out on their own.

I think like with most Apple services, iCloud will continue to get better as it goes along.