We'll be looking four major Cloud Storage services: Dropbox, SugarSync, SkyDrive, and Google Drive. With these, we'll go through your options. All those Symbian mobile operating system based smartphone ... files for Cloud storage based services such as Google Docs (Google Drive)
Storing Files Online is finally approaching critical mass with all the big players in the tech world offering some sort of solution or another. The dedicated services, Dropbox and SugarSync, served to hook everybody on the idea of storing and sharing files online, but since then Microsoft and then Google have rolled out their own offerings. All the services offer free storage, with paid options for increased quotas. An obvious benefit of storing files online is being able to view and edit files on a mobile device while you're out and about. This list looks at the relative merits of the options available for Symbian users.
Storing Files Online is finally approaching critical mass with all the big players in the tech world offering some sort of solution or another. The dedicated services, Dropbox and SugarSync, served to hook everybody on the idea of storing and sharing files online, but since then Microsoft and then Google have rolled out their own offerings. All the services offer free storage, with paid options for increased quotas. An obvious benefit of storing files online is being able to view and edit files on a mobile device while you're out and about. This list looks at the relative merits of the options available for Symbian users.
Google SkyDrive
SkyDrive is Microsoft's offering into the cloud storage world and comes as part of its Live services. Of all the cloud storage services, SkyDrive has the most storage available for free accounts. It is currently 7GB, however, it was initially 25GB and existing users were given the option to keep this when the reduction to 7GB was implemented. In addition to raw storage, the desktop SkyDrive website also includes web-based versions of the Microsoft Office suite allowing for online editing and collaboration – however the functionality of these web applications are noticeably scaled down to their desktop versions, and aren't as good in practice for real time collaboration as Google Docs.
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SkyDrive's mobile site works best with Opera
In terms of Symbian use, there is a third party application, "SkyFiles", which we recently reported on. Additionally, several applications like Microsoft OneNote and the latest version of Quickoffice Premium all access your office documents on SkyDrive. There is also a mobile website for SkyDrive, however it does not appear to support the Symbian browser (it does work with Opera though!).
The costs for expanding your SkyDrive storage are as follows:
- +20GB £6.00 per year.
- +50GB £16.00 per year.
- +100GB £32.00 per year.
Clearly there is great value for money here compared to the competing products. However, in my use of SkyDrive, I have observed that the desktop sync client (available for Windows and Mac) performs quite poorly when faced with a huge number of files (in excess of 10,000), and so while you can theoretically buy the storage to back up most (if not all) of your files, the actual sync process won't scale to large amounts of files until Microsoft fix it.
