So you thought Apple was being generous when the company allotted 5GB of free online storage space for every new iCloud user? Cloud storage service Box.net has been in the business a little longer than Apple, and today the company has announced that it’s offering 10 times more storage for iOS users.

If you download the free Box.net app for the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, you now get 50GB of storage space for free. The company is also increasing file size limits from 25MB to 100MB for iOS users.

Box lets you store photos, music, videos, documents, or any other type of file online. You can use the Box apps for iOS to view your files on a mobile device, or login using a web browser to access your files from any computer.

This isn’t the first time Box has given away a huge amount of storage for free. The company also offered the same deal to HP TouchPad customers… although that’s a pretty limited market since HP canceled the TouchPad just 45 days after launching the tablet. There are millions of iOS users though, so either Box has got some crazy infrastructure, or nobody really expects all iOS users to sign up for new Box accounts.

In order to get your 50GB of free storage, you’ll need to sign up within the next 50 days.

Ubuntu One is service that lets subscribers back up data from a computer running the Ubuntu Linux operating system to the web and synchronize files and settings between multiple computers.

A while back, Canonical released Ubuntu One Music, a companion Android app which allowed users of the cloud sync platform to effortlessly access music purchased through its own store or uploaded from a connected system. While that was certainly a good first step, Ubuntu One is capable of syncing more than just tunes… so what about accessing all those other files on the go?

Enter the shiny, new Ubuntu One Files app for Android. In addition to providing on-the-go access to your files in the cloud, you can also upload new files directly from your smartphone and manage and share existing files and folders.

Hungry for more? Ubuntu One Files has at least one other trick up its sleeve. The app can also silently sync all the photos you take with your Android’s camera to the photos folder in your U1 cloud storage — which, of course, automatically syncs them back down to all your connected desktops. It’s a nice way to make sure you never accidentally delete an important snapshot from your phone without backing it up first.

Of course it also means that embarrassing antiquing episodes and duct-taping-to-the-wall incidents could be instantly pushed to multiple locations when you’d rather they just be forgotten about entirely. It’s a user-switchable option, of course, and you can always turn it off and manually sync the photos you want to keep at your leisure.

Grab the app from the Android Market — and remember, you’ll need a Ubuntu One account in order for it to be at all useful.

Quite some time ago, ambitious hackers learned that Windows Phone 7 could work as a USB mass storage device — the feature simply wasn’t enabled by default. To switch it on required a little manual hacking in the registry, but locked devices were still out of luck. Then along came the Chevron WP7 “jailbreak” tool, and anyone who was willing to engage in a little “unsupported modification” was able to drag and drop files in Windows Explorer.

Now, however, there’s an easier method. No registry hacking is required, just download the WP7 USB Storage Enabler. The tool works on both locked and unlocked devices, and all that’s required is the .Net 2.0 framework and Zune software (though chances are good you’ve got both installed already). Once the prerequisites are satisfied, simply launch the tool and click the enable button. If you want to shut USB mass storage mode off later, launch the tool again and click disable.

In a geeky Utopian future, all smartphones will allow us to drag and drop music, photos, and videos so that we can enjoy them on the go with minimal fuss. If that never happens, at least there are plenty of enterprising programmers who will lend a hand.

via WP Central

With so many Android apps now able to install themselves to your microSD card — or at least store application data on it — it’s not hard to fritter away a few megabytes or even gigabytes in a hurry. That’s why it’s a good idea to have a few apps installed to help you keep an eye on your storage media and let you know where excess bits can be trimmed.

Grid Size is one option worth taking for a test drive. It works a bit like desktop drive space analyzers like  Space Sniffer or WinDirStat. Fire up Grid Size and give it a few moments to analyze the contents of your device, and it’ll show you which files and folders are eating up your valuable storage. Both a graphical view and text listing are available, and since Grid Size is a file manager app as well you can move or delete files as you hunt for space hogs.

It’s a free download and is compatible with devices running Android 2.0 or better.

via Gotta Be Mobile and xda-developers

Read the rest of this entry »

Online storage service Box.net is launching a new version of its Android app, with improved support for uploading files from your mobile phone. In addition to uploading files from your SD card using the file browser, you can also now go into the native photo, video, and music apps to upload files.

The new version also has a new “create” option, which lets you snap a photo, shoot a video, or record an audio file and send it straight to your Box.net online account.

The folks at Box say the latest version is also more stable and runs more smoothly than earlier builds. The update should be available from the Android Market Friday morning at 9AM Pacific Time.

Box.net provides users with 5GB of free online storage space, as well as subscription options for users who need more space.

First the good news: Unlike certain smartphone platforms on the market, Windows Phone 7 will allow users to store data on SD cards, not just built-in storage space.

Now the bad news: You won’t easily be able to remove and replace that SD card.

That’s because Microsoft says Windows Phone devices will have special SD cards that offer high performance — and which are recognized by the phone as internal storage. Say your phone comes with 8GB of flash storage and a 8GB SD card. Basically the device will think there’s 16GB of internal storage. If you remove the SD card it might not be readable in other devices — and if you try to insert a new SD card your phone might not recognize it — or work properly, since important files and settings may have already been written to the original SD card.

Not all Windows Phone 7 devices will have SD cards, but if yours does have one it will likely be accessible in a slot beneath your battery. Microsoft just suggests you never actually pop out that card.

via IntoMobile

One of the new features in Google Android 2.2 Froyo is the ability to store applications on an SD card, freeing up space on your phone’s main memory. Developers need to enable this feature in their apps, so not every app available can be stored on an SD card, but I’ve already freed up plenty of storage space on my Nexus One by moving a handful of apps to my 8GB microSD card.

So I was pretty excited to learn that Barnes & Noble had released a new version of the Nook eBook reader for Android. When I first checked out the Nook app a few weeks ago, I was pretty impressed with its features, but underwhelmed by the fact that it took up more than 17MB of storage space — making it by far the largest app on my phone. I quickly uninstalled it.

Today I tried downloading the latest version of the Nook app and then I moved it to my SD card. You can see the results above. It still takes up more storage space than any other app on my device — and that’s main storage. When I uninstalled the Nook app, my phone storage available space jumped from about 28MB to 40MB.

In other words, moving an app to your SD card doesn’t actually move all of the files to your SD card. Some files will be left behind, and in the case of the Nook app, they still take up an awful lot of space. If you have a phone with a huge amount of internal storage space, or if you only plan to install a few apps, this might not be a problem. But with the Amazon Kindle app using less than 4MB and the Borders app taking up less than 1MB, it seems strange that Barnes & Noble’s eBook reader takes up so much space.

On the other hand, the latest version for the Kindel app also adds a few other features such a new search function in the library, four new themes, and new screen settings. You can also copy unencrypted ePUB files from a computer to your device and open them in the Nook app.

Nook for Android is available as a free download from the Android Market.

via Gizmodo

Up until recently Android phones tended to use SD cards as storage space, while reserving the internal memory for installed programs and personal data. But the HTC Incredible and a few other recent phones are shipping with large amounts of internal storage space which you can use to store music, videos, and other data — and developers are starting to alter their applications to take advantage of that feature.

According to the official doubleTwist Twitter account, the company plans to add support for internal memory to its recently launched music player for Google Android.

I suspect we’ll start to see other apps with support for internal storage soon — particularly media apps like doubleTwist.

via Talk Android