Cloud Service And You…(1)

There I was, about to board a bus home. I brought out my Nokia C5-03 Symbian mobile phone to play with while the bus moved on. The phone was a low end smartphone with just 128mb of RAM and 600mhz processor with a modest 2gb memory card inside. There was nothing spectacular about the phone, it was a 3.2 inch resistive touchscreen of 640*360 resolution and a 5 mega pixel fixed focus camera, but I loved it nonetheless for it had been my companion for the last 8 months.

My Nokia phone with its modest camera had enabled me to capture those unforgetable moments. My pictures, music, videos, my documents and other files where on this little mobile computer. Basically, it was my life for the past 8 months.

I alighted from the bus when I got to my destination and headed home. When I got to the door and put the key in, I felt a familiar but “strange” feeling. It was familiar because it could only mean one thing and it was strange cause I had not been in that situation before. My pocket felt loose and empty and I reached for it with my hands to confirm my greatest fear, my mobile phone was gone! Shivers went down spine and I took out my other Samsung flip feature phone to dial my phone number. The reply sent me into oblivion, “the number you are trying to dial is switched off”. The phone fell from my pocket while I was seated in the bus and my mind wondered who could have picked it up.

After about an hour, someone picked it up and I explained my predicament. Unluckily for me, it was the bus conductor and Lagos bus conductors are not known to be nice. He played with me for a while, pretending not to hear me and after meandering for a while, I begged him to just let me have my sim card and memory card. My memory card bothered me the.most cause my files on it were not backed up to any computer system, flash drive or Cloud service. I wasnt bothered about the phone or about the sim card because they could easily be replaced, but about my memory card which held my precious memories and files.

After a little while, he hung up and that was the last I heard of my now lost phone. Right there and then, I wished I had signed up for a cloud service. A cloud service is basically an online storage facility for data. Cloud computing entrusts services with a users data, software and computation over a network. It’s a cohesive network that enables users to access files uploaded to the cloud service to be accessed over multiple devices. You can simply refer to it as an “external online hardrive”.

There are various Cloud services offered by different companies. Some of which are Amazon Cloud drive, Drop box, Sky drive, Google and iCloud. They all come with their different offerings and features and I would briefly review them.

Have music on your PC that you want to listen to on your smartphone? Boom, stream it from the cloud.
Want to access a document on another computer? Bam! grab it from your web-connected “cloud” drive. Ideally, with cloud services you can access other types
of media, such as photos, e-books and videos, across
multiple devices, too.
But cloud services vary between companies so much
that the buzzword can get awfully confusing. What
exactly do you get? Is it just online storage? Or is it
streaming media? Both? In the chart below, we give a
side-by-side comparison of five major cloud services,
in terms of features, device compatibility and storage
space.

Features
Device
Music
iCloud
Includes 5 GB of free online storage,
synchronization for music, photos, apps,
documents, iBooks, contacts, e-mail and
calendars; cost for additional data not yet
announced.
Macs and iOS 5 (Windows PCs get PhotoStream
and some basic features only)
All iTunes-purchased music can be shared
between devices; iTunes Match: $25 per year to
push 25,000 tracks in your library to be shared
through iCloud

Google
Includes 1 GB free online storage for Google Docs,
1 GB free storage for Picasa, 7 GB free storage for
Gmail; streaming music, synchronized documents,
contacts, e-mail, calendars; expandable to 16 TB
for $4,000 per year
All devices with a web browser.
Google Music Beta lets you upload up to 20,000
tracks from your own library
Amazon CloudDrive
Includes 5GB free online storage; additional
storage can be purchased for $1 per gigabyte per
year.
All devices compatible with Adobe Flash.
Includes Cloud Player music-streaming
application.

Windows Live
Includes 25 GB free storage for files and
synchronization for photos.
Windows PC, Mac, Windows Phone 7

Dropbox
Includes 2GB free storage, upgradeable to 100 GB
for $200 per year
All devices with a web browser or Dropbox client.
Built-in audio player in web interface and iOS
client.

Those are basically the offerings of these Cloud services. A full review on each awaits you in my next article.

Posted from WordPress for Android…by Ufuoma Ozore