PC maker Acer has received some heavy criticism at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, with journalists saying the company has borrowed heavily from Apple’s iCloud with its new cloud offering, AcerCloud – even to the point of copying a slide to use in its presentation.

Mashable has called AcerCloud an ‘iCloud clone’, while The Verge says it is a ‘blatant iCloud ripoff’, pointing to an image from Acer’s presentation next to a similar image from an Apple presentation and saying, ‘let’s try a little harder next year, yeah guys?’

AcerCloud differs from iCloud in that documents and photos are ultimately stored on the user’s PC, but he or she can automatically share them to his or her smartphone or tablet for up to 30 days. That’s not very long, but then AcerCloud will have no charge, while iCloud is only free to a limit of 5GB.

As for the presentation slide, how many ways are there to visualise a cloud system?

Do you think AcerCloud is a copy of iCloud? Let us know in the comments.