After months of whispers and rumors, Apple’s finally tipped its hand: iCloud is a real product, it’ll debut at next week’s WWDC, and through it, iTunes will be making its long-rumored leap into the cloud. But when all is said and done, what will iCloud actually be, and why should anyone care?

Today at 1PM ET/10AM PT, I’ll be hosting a live Q&A about iCloud and Apple’s cloud ambitions over at The Washington Post. The Q&A will last roughly an hour. I’d love it if some of CoM’s readers came by to ask questions and chat.

To follow the Q&A, all you need to do is click this link, or go to https://wapo.st/jqM0Bk. You can ask questions now. Otherwise, you can ask a question via Twitter by either sending a question to @postlive using the hashtag #wpchat.

I hope some of you guys will come by and chat about iCloud with me, lest I have to fill dead air with obscene limericks. See you then!

Update: And that’s all she wrote! Thanks for coming by and asking questions, guys. If you want to see the transcript, you can find it here

Where will you get the fastest streaming speeds once iCloud launches? Most likely at the new retail location Apple is opening up a stone’s throw from its North Carolina data super center.

Apple’s announcement that iCloud should appear June 6 couldn’t be better timed. Owners of iOS devices are heavy music and video users, streaming more media than Android or any mobile operating system… and with iCloud’s debut, it’s only going to get more lopsided.

There’s something fishy about this, but iPad 3G has supposedly been hacked to make phone calls and send SMS messages — just like a giant iPhone!

Check out the video of the supersized iPad/iPhone in action:

When Apple debuts iOS 5 at June’s WWDC, it will indeed feature Nuance voice recognition tech… but counter-intuitively, it won’t be baked into iOS’s existing Voice Control feature. If that disappoints you, though, we hope this will be a consolation: iOS 5 will radically re-imagine iOS’s sketchy notifications system, as well as add widgets to the mix.

You know the drill. Every year, Apple gives students a special incentive to buy a new Mac in the form of a cheap iPod.

This year, though, the deal might be a lot spicier: students might get a couple bills off a new iPad instead of an entry-level iPod Touch. And Cupertino might just be so excited about this that Back to School will prominently be mentioned at next week’s WWDC.

The iPhone isn’t likely to get NFC-capabilities allowing it to function as a credit card until 2012, according to most reports, but Apple’s biggest competitor in the smartphone arena has no intention of waiting so long: Google is preparing to unveil their own mobile payment system on May 26th.

It ain’t over until it’s over, Yogi Berra once said. The sports legend could have been talking about Apple’s attempt to lure the music industry onto the cloud. Just as an agreement to make your music accessible everywhere seemed at hand, publishers want more cash.

With iOS 4, Apple left the original iPhone and iPod Touch behind in the dust of iOS 3.1.3, and even the iPhone 3G could not avail itself of some of iOS 4’s most notable features, like multitasking. As long as you at least had an iPhone 3GS, though, you’d be fine.

Given how many problems the iPhone 3G hardware had running iOS 4.0, it should come as no surprise that Apple is hoping to consign that hardware to the dustbin when they debut iOS 5 at WWDC next month. What may be more surprising is that the iPhone 3GS will go into the dustbin too.

It’s enough to bring a smile to an angry bird: Apple’s iTunes can boast a half-million apps. That figure likely will get an official stamp of approval when CEO Steve Jobs speaks June 9 before developers at the annual WWDC in San Francisco.