Dropbox/Samsung Partnership

Lucas Mearian, reporting for Computerworld:

Dropbox said the deeper integration includes several new Samsung devices, such as the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Grand smartphone and smart cameras. Samsung cameras will automatically push the photos to Dropbox’s cloud storage service.

Dropbox is available natively on the Samsung Galaxy III, Samsung Galaxy Note II, and Samsung Galaxy Camera. Users configuring the devices will be offered free 50GB of capacity when they activate Dropbox, according to Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, head of mobile business development.

Sounds like a good deal. Out of the box, you get 50 GB of cloud storage — universally hailed as best-of-breed for simplicity and syncing reliability — that works with whatever other computers or tablets you might own. It’s not an exclusivity advantage for Samsung — again, Dropbox works almost everywhere — but it might be an out-of-the-box advantage, and it may well introduce many people to Dropbox for the first time.

As an aside, the other night my third-grade son saw me okaying the latest update to the Dropbox app on my iPhone. He said his teachers are “always talking about Dropbox”. I asked him what he thought Dropbox was. “It’s how they email files from the school’s computers to their iPads.” Like I wrote a few weeks ago, it’s a linchpin in the iPad experience.

★ Wednesday, 9 January 2013