If you’re a fan of Dropbox, box.net, or any other online storage service, you might want to start paying attention to Microsoft. The Redmond folks released SkyDrive for iPhone and Windows Phone on Wednesday. SkyDrive lets you have 25 Gigabytes of free online storage in which you can store and share any digital file you want.
While Windows Phone users has had SkyDrive linked to their photo gallery and Office app, it hadn’t been available for much else aside from Windows Live email. Windows Phone owners automatically receive SkyDrive upon registering to the Microsoft’s Live service, which is required for every Windows Phone.
While Apple offers a free 5GB iCloud account for every iPhone, iPod touch and iPad owner, it never included the iDisk functionality with the service which was previously available for MobileMe subscribers. Apple’s MobileMe offered 20GB for $99 per year, expandable by purchasing additional space. The new iCloud is not available as a file storage service the way Dropbox and SkyDrive are.
Unlike Dropbox however, SkyDrive app lets you create and remove folders right from within the app. Unfortunately, it is not a sync service out of the box. It’s not difficult however to map a folder in Windows as a SkyDrive, just needs additional software installation, although apparently Windows, Android, and Mac apps are coming. When these apps finally arrive, you can expect some serious competition to Dropbox and box.net.
SkyDrive also allows you to share documents with other SkyDrive users or through other means by sharing a link to the file. If you’re a Hotmail, Microsoft Messenger, or Windows Live or XBox Live user, you already have SkyDrive.
SkyDrive for iPhone and Windows Phone are available from the App Store and Marketplace respectively.
