Dropbox is putting a bigger smile on the face of some Android users. They are handing out more free space on their servers. In fact, now they are giving out five gigabytes of free storage.
Dropbox is ascending in popularity among startups. They are in the billion dollar club, with the help of some heavy hitters. Goldman Sachs, the bankers in charge of much of the economy of the world was involved in making stars out of the Dropbox crowd. At the middle of this Summer, Dropbox was valued at an impressive five billion dollars.
Now that you know the valuation of this important part of the mobile web you will be presented with another one that is similar. If you are the owner of a certain Android smartphone you will be able to match up that five billion number with another big number; five gigabytes. This is not for just any smartphone user, it is for those who have HTC smartphones. HTC made the announcement that they have partnered with Dropbox to hand out this rather large chunk of computer storage to their customers. There is a small requirment for those HTC customers to get the five gigabytes of storage. They must be using the HTC graphical user interface called Sense in the 3.5 version.
Will Dropbox keep this away from the other makers of smartphones? There are two other major makers of smartphones that use the Android mobile operating system, Samsung and Motorola. Motorola recently became the property of Google, which should be very close comrades with the Goldman Sachs company. There is no indicator yet if a deal will be struck with them or not. For now, the Dropbox deal is limited to HTC and users of Sense 3.5. It also takes a special app to make it work.
What can you put into five gigabytes of space? Plenty. A short video takes up around 40 megabytes of data on a disc. That is just .039 of a gigabyte. That means you could get 128 of those short videos up on the Dropbox server to share with anyone who had access to them. That is if you had the right HTC Android smartphone. The convenience of having your files on the Dropbox service is that backing up critical files is a snap. Just drop or drag them into the right folder and the work is done.
Sharing a folder that has any type of file in it is a strong point of the Dropbox service. It is possible to have your whole workforce sharing the same files and not be in the same location, thanks to their smartphone and Dropbox. If people change their files, the changes appear immediately in the folder. The only drawback, if there is one, is that all files go into one folder. There is no separating the documents from the music files or the video files from the images. It all goes into one place. This will be fixed in the future, but for now is a small nuisance. For those users who are not on an HTC Android device, Dropbox offers two gigabytes of free space to use.
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