With the latest launch of iCloud, Apple has joined the race in offering cloud computing services along with Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

The companies have gone beyond the idea of just storing music, video and e-books at a hosted platform and getting access from multiple devices.

Starting with the space offered by each companies, iCloud has 5 GB of free online storage along with synchronization for music, photos, apps, documents, iBooks, contacts, e-mail and calendars.

Google includes 1 GB free online storage for Google Docs, 1 GB free storage for Picasa, 7 GB free storage for Gmail with streaming music, synchronized documents, contacts, e-mail, calendars while Amazon CloudDrive has a 5 GB free online storage with an additional storage purchasable at $1 per gigabyte per year.

Windows Live has 25 GB free storage for files and synchronization of photos. Dropbox has a free storage of 2GB, which is upgradeable to 100 GB for $200 per year.

Amazon’s Cloud device can be accessed from all devices that are compatible with Adobe Flash. It’s an online stocker which stores your files and lets you access them from any device.

Google dosen’t have a single platform that hosts all your apps. Photos are dealt within Picassa, e-mails in Gmail, online music storage in Music Beta and documents in Google Docs.

In case of a Dropbox, all devices are with a web-browser or Dropbox client. It has a built-in audio player in web interface and iOS client.

Microsoft offers the least, as you can’t subscribe space beyond the free 25 GBs. It can be accessed through Windows PC, Mac, Windows Phone 7.

Apple’s iCloud works as if its invisible. It can make the photo that you take on your iPhone pop up on your Mac or Windows PC. A document which you edited on the Pages app on a Mac can appear on the Pages app on your iPhone.

iCloud enables users to have individual control over the music, apps and books and can also specify whether or not pushing the content should be limited to wi-fi connections only to save cellular bandwidth. iCloud also enables automatic wireless backups for iOS devices.

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