Multiple iCloud issues

I have a MacBook Pro (Early 2011) & an iPhone 4 & have been (trying) to use iCloud since it launched earlier this year. However I have been having some issues that I hope this thread would help get resolved. Some of these issues popped up as recently as a couple of days ago (Saturday).

1. Mail. I do not get notifications of emails through the Mail app unless I launch the app & wait for it to load up there. Not all the time this is so though. Sometimes they pop up if I get a wifi connection (when I wasn't using any internet connection just prior), reboot the phone, or just randomly when I get notified of emails, some of which came at least an hour prior.
2. Bookmarks. I use Google Chrome as my primary browser, but sync my bookmarks using Xmarks for both browsers. I do check Safari to see if the bookmarks are synced properly & they are but, they never show up on the iPhone. I have tried at least for a day to use Safari as a primary browser & add bookmarks to see if it would work, but the same result. The only ways I end up getting the bookmarks on are to either follow these instructions or to use the method I did prior to using Xmarks & iCloud which was to save an HTML file of the Chrome bookmarks & import them in Safari (which worked fine).
3. Photo Stream. This is that recent problem I mentioned. Up until a couple of days ago, this worked fine. Took a pic on iPhone, automatically uploaded to Mac/iPhoto, no problems. Saturday though something seemed to have gone wrong as no photos I have taken since then have been uploaded to iPhoto. This happened before (again after a long period of it working fine) & the solution there was to disable/enable Photo Stream & have it download all the photos again.
4. Contacts pictures. Not sure if this is necessarily iCloud related, but have a feelng it is. All my contact pictures were suddenly gone a day. I use SmartSync to sync my contact's Facebook pictures to use as their pictures. Never had a problem, until recently. Even when I sync them using the app they don't show up if I get a call from that contact. If I check them in iCloud's Contacts though they are there as if nothing happened.

Again, I am hoping that I could get some solutions/suggestions on how to solve these issues with iCloud.

Thanks.