No PDFs, No Co-editing On Underwhelming Apple iCloud

An anonymous reader writes "Apple's iCloud service has been a little overlooked in the bunfight for the iPhone 4S. When it was first announced some predicted it would wipe out companies like Box.net, DropBox and so on. As the NYTimes put it, "Maybe Apple will kill them all.' Box.net's CEO disagreed and it looks like he was right. You can't store PDFs and images on iCloud except with PhotoStream, there's no co-editing, and the document management interface is a shambles."

Re:It just proves analyst are complete idiots

[Sockatume]

It's a blog post by a company trying to sell a cloud document editing and management product. What did you expect them to do when Apple started giving away the 10% of their product that 90% of their potential customers would actually use, for free?

I don't get Apple

[mark_reh]

The interface to the iPhone is via iTunes. I tried to put a pdf on my wife's iPhone for her because she couldn't figure out how and I couldn't figure out how to do it via iTunes either. Finally, a friend with an iPhone told me the easiest way to do it is to email it and use the phone to grab the emailed file. Doesn't Apple think that people use their phones for anything but listening to music and looking at photos? Oh yeah, there are all sorts of apps, but how does anyone who works for a living get business related stuff on and off the phone?

The software is still called iTunes ferschissakes. If you're in anything but the music business why would software called iTunes seem to be the right choice? It sounds like something you'd sell to college kids so they could load their phone with pirated music.

Re:It just proves analyst are complete idiots

[Lou3000]

The iCloud is underwhelming for users like myself (and I would imagine everyone reading Slashdot). But I also think you're right, it isn't DropBox. It is really just a back end service for your iPhone's native photo, video, and document apps. It isn't so that you can share a document to be edited by a group, it is so that you can store a document and then edit it later on your Mac or iPad without e-mailing it or syncing. On the other hand, I sort of understand where this article is coming from. Apple separated iCloud as its own product. They didn't simply turn on "cloud saves," they set up a website for the services and have been playing up its features as a major selling point. DropBox and the like now need to convince users that they still have a spot on the iOS device and the iCloud isn't like their "cloud." And in truth, iCloud will push DropBox off of my iOS device, because iCloud is all I need and it is seemlessly integrated.