SkyDrive for Android [how does it match up]

I have to say sorry it’s taken me this long to write about this… you know me, I love my cloud apps.  But I wanted to ensure I gave it a fair shake in comparison to the others out there.

Aside from being sick the past few days, I also had used SkyDrive a long time ago, so I wanted to see how well it worked with what I once had.

So… let’s take a look at it now.

Opening it up it reloads the thumbnails each time… seems somewhat useless.  But then again I don’t really need the thumbnails – just worried about data consumption.

From the main screen we can change views, upload (nice that it puts the camera folder at the top), or create a new folder.

Opening the settings screen kinda bummed me out as it reminded me that it automatically changed my old 25GB account that you got with it to the 7GB plan (unfortunately since I hadn’t used it in so long it didn’t get me the option like others to ‘re-claim’ to get the free upgrade… le sigh)

And that’s about pretty much it.  There’s not much ‘settings’ to the settings.  And that’s pretty much it to the whole app.

Don’t get me wrong, it works like it should.  Click a file and it gives you the option to share the file (which downloads a local copy, then attaches), copy the public file link, or download, which then downloads a local copy for your viewing / editing pleasure.  Make any changes to it, and those changes are only saved to the local copy.  It doesn’t work like many of the others where it’ll re-save it in the cloud.  Sure, you can re-upload… but it’s missing the point.  Cloud should be a fair bit more.

Then again, this is the first offering.  Before we had that 3rd party app from SoRaMi… and even Google Docs (now Drive) was pretty basic in the beginning.

All in all, I’m half impressed.  I have to say, I do like the simple sharp look of the app.  Makes me really want to test it out on that new ATIV S (Samsung, do you hear me?  I’d like to demo one!), and seeing as I’m a “live” user from way back I really want to like it, but it’s just too ‘simple’ at the moment.  But here’s hoping this design of theirs travels over to their mail app.  That one designed by Windows + Seven just sucks… and doesn’t work all that well on JB.  ugh

Features it could add in the second iteration:  auto-upload/sync of files/folders, editing in the cloud, bonus space for ‘recommendations’.

Also, after checking the upgrade space option, it turns out that it has the best additional space cost of the group.

Well, let’s see how it stacks up against the others with my handy-dandy “Cloud Options” database.  I’ve had to re-do some of the ‘bests’ out there as it’s caused some stir.

[remember: I’ve put up yellow for BEST, silver for SECOND, and a bronze for THIRD place in each of the categories]

SkyDrive is now 2nd for free space amount, and is 2nd for extra storage space cost