Apple kills MobileMe. Say hello to iCloud, for free.

In short, “we’re going to move the digital hub into the cloud. Everything on your devices is kept in sync without even having to think about it.” Download a new song to your phone? It will go to the cloud and be available on your mac. According to Jobs, “iCloud stores your content in the cloud and wirelessly pushes all of it to your other devices.”

So, how about the details? Here you go.

Jobs points out that MobileMe simply “wasn’t our finest hour, but we learned a lot”. First off, it works with your Contacts, Calendar and Mail:

So when I make a new contact on my iPhone, it’s automatically brought up to the cloud, and then pushed down to my devices to sync, and then it’s updated on all my devices. And if I change it, it’s updated on all devices.

Calendars will store in the cloud and changes will be pushed to all of your devices. For Android users, this will look very, very familiar. For those of you who want your mail without ads (ouch, Steve) you can have a mail account at me.com

So as of today, MobileMe is no more, and iCloud takes over. Better yet, it’s free and contains new apps.

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Your App Store purchase history will now be shown on all devices. iBooks will be in the iCloud as well and finally you can back up all of your information to iCloud. In short, Google, it’s your move.

We’ve added wireless backup to the cloud. Once daily, we’re gonna back up a lot of your important content to the cloud. If you ever get a new phone, everything will be loaded onto that phone automatically.

Interestingly, iCloud will store anything that you do in Pages, Keynote and the rest of the iWork suite. This is a huge blow against Google Docs, to say the least.

We’ve been working for 10 years to get rid of the file system. When you try and teach someone to use a Mac, everything is fine, until you show them the file system. On iOS, you don’t have to think about it. But how do you move those documents around? Now you can.

What’s that, Windows users? You’re jealous? No need to be. Apple is working on API’s to make it cross platform.

Photo Stream is Apple’s newest toy with the iCloud format. Take a photo, it will be uploaded to any device that you have connected with your iCloud account. On the Mac, it’s built right into iPhoto and it’s available on Apple TV, as well. On a PC, it will work with your My Pictures folder, keeping your latest 1,000 photos synchronized for 30 days. At the end of the 30 days? Well…we’re just not sure. It appears that you’ll need to back them up to a folder in order to keep them longer.

iCloud is available today set to be available this fall, including 5 GB of storage for free. Just sign in with your Apple ID. Oh, and that 5 GB isn’t taken up by your Photo Stream.