- August 1, 2011 09:46pm EST
Apple went live with its iCloud website Monday but the new portal for the company's big cloud-based services push appears to still be a work-in-progress. Access to the site is reportedly available only to existing MobileMe customers on Mac OS X desktops and notebooks.
Another big hint that iCloud.com isn't precisely ready for prime time—the prominent yellow "beta" banner attached to the log-in screen.
While some MobileMe users are reporting the ability to log into iCloud.com, where they can then access working apps, others are prompted to move their existing MobileMe mail, contacts, calendar, and bookmarks over to iCloud with a popup window that doesn't appear to be functional, according to AppleInsider.
A first attempt by PCMag editors to simply log into the site on a Mac met with no success other than a screen promising that iCloud is "coming soon." Later, when we tried installing the latest iOS update on an iPhone before a second try, our log in attempt on iCloud.com was still a no-go.
That may be because the insides of the new iCloud site haven't yet been made available to iOS devices, according to AppleInsider. Other iPad and iPhone users can access the iCloud.com landing page but apparently get stuck on the same "coming soon" screen we ourselves did.
"MobileMe Web apps are currently blocked from iOS mobile users, apparently because Apple's mobile browser does not support the 'real web' well enough to work acceptably with them," according to the site. "This prevents iOS users from accessing a secondary account."
Piecing together reports from around the Web, it seems only MobileMe customers using Macs with OS X Lion installed can get inside iCloud.com, and it's not entirely clear if those are the only criteria required.
Tablets and smartphones running Google's Android and other non-iOS mobile operating systems are also apparently able to access the "coming soon" screen which prompts visitors to "download the iOS native apps," though no such apps exist for those devices.
In the very early going, iCloud.com appears to be aimed only at developers, according to 9to5Mac.
"Apple has just opened up the iCloud.com Web interface for developers," the site reports. "The website is in beta and features all new Web apps for Mail, Calendar, Contacts, and more. In addition, it appears that iCloud.com will offer a portal for users to view their iWork documents that are stored in the cloud via iCloud. On top of all of this, Find my iPhone is an integrated Web application."
The first user to report successfully logging into Apple's new iCloud service was Rafael Fischmann of the Brazilian MacMagazine blog, according to AppleInsider.
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