Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Dropbox offer "cloud" services hosting data over the internet. (Photo: Extra Medium/Flickr)

With the recent announcement of iCloud, Apple joins Google, Amazon and Microsoft in their aggressive push into cloud computing, in a race to reel customers into their media ecosystems.

The general idea of the “cloud” is to store your media on the internet so you can access it from any device anywhere, as opposed to leaving it on a hard drive. Now with cloud services, we can juggle around our data between multiple gadgets.

Have music on your PC that you want to listen to on your smartphone? Boom, stream it from the cloud. Want to access a document on another computer? Bam, grab it from your web-connected “cloud” drive. Ideally, with cloud services you can access other types of media, such as photos, e-books and videos, across multiple devices, too.

But cloud services vary between companies so much that the buzzword can get awfully confusing. What exactly do you get? Is it just online storage? Or is it streaming media? Both? In the chart below, we give a side-by-side comparison of five major cloud services, in terms of features, device compatibility and storage space.

Pretty complicated differences, right? For further clarity, here’s what you need to know about how each service works.

iCloud

Apple designed its iCloud service to work as if it were invisible. Snap a photo on your iPhone and it pops up on your Mac or Windows PC. Edit a document in the Pages app on a Mac, and that same edit appears on the Pages app on your iPhone. Buy a song on iTunes on your Mac, and on your iPhone you can re-download it; same with e-books you buy through iBooks.

Additionally, iCloud enables automatic wireless backups for iOS devices. Each Apple customer gets 5 GB of free space for backups, documents and e-mail; the photos, music and books don’t count toward the 5 GB.

Apple has left some questions unanswered as to whether iCloud will have a web app interface for accessing these services from any device with a browser, like MobileMe did. However, we believe it’s shortsighted to think that iCloud would not eventually have a web app suite to complement the aforementioned services.

Amazon

Amazon’s Cloud Drive is as straightforward as a cloud service gets: It’s just an online storage locker. You put files in there, and they’re online. You can access the files from any device that supports Flash. (That means Cloud Drive is useless for any iPhone or iPad customer, since the devices do not support Flash.) Sign up for a Cloud Drive and you get 5 GB for free; you can pay an extra $1 per extra gigabyte each year.

Google

Google’s “cloud” suite can be confusing: There’s no one-stop destination that hosts all your media. You have to go to Picasa to deal with your photos, Gmail for your e-mail, Music Beta for online music storage and Google Docs for your documents. Each service offers at least 1 GB of free space, and you can plunk down an extra $5 per year to add 20 gigs for most of its services. You can rent up to 16 TB each year for $4,000 (you know, in case you’re trying to boot up Skynet).

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