

HTC’s Answer To iCloud: A New Deal With Dropbox - pppppo
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/26/htcs-answer-to-icloud-a-new-deal-with-dropbox/

======
cmelbye
Am I the only one that thinks that it makes no sense to compare Dropbox and
iCloud?

Dropbox is glorified rsync, and, in my eyes, is great for syncing files
between my laptops that still use a file management paradigm from 20+ years
ago.

iCloud abstracts files away from the user, so that the user doesn't need to
worry about folders and extensions and filesystems. iCloud CAN do what Dropbox
does, but it takes it so much further.

Am I totally off base?

~~~
usaar333
Just because our file management paradigm is 20+ years old, is it so bad?

When you have a "lot of crap", you want some sort of organization to it.
Folders do this well; gmail-esque labels arguably better.

I can't see how you can get away with "hiding files" themselves. In the end, a
file can have multiple applications handle it (view, edit, etc.).. somewhere
the files need to be visible.

On another note, Dropbox offers plenty more features. It is among the easiest
ways to share files with another. And it runs on almost every platform; I
can't even comment much on iCloud as I lack OS/X or an iOS device.

~~~
PeterWhittaker
We needed a file management paradigm because we couldn't simply say to the
filing system "bring me the X file, the one about Y". Now we can.

The machines have caught up to our need and we may now be lazy.

I am 46. I have worked in IT long enough to remember having to be obsessively
organized.

Why? Because I had no choice. The machine could not help me.

I have become lazy in my dotage.

Why? Because the machine lets me.

gmail search is so fast I no longer organize email - it simply isn't worth
organizing. I enter criteria, I find my email. When I was organized, I would
have to break my current flow to remember my organizational method - which
morphed over time, good luck with that.

find is now so fast - because of fast hardware - that I no longer even bother
to try remembering where I filed things, I just type

    
    
       fndi criterion
    

(fndi, he said?

function fndi () {

    
    
            tgt="${1}"; shift
    	
            echo find . -iname \*"${tgt}"\* "${@}"
    
    	find . -iname \*"${tgt}"\* "${@}"

}

In other words, case-insensitive search starting in CWD, with optional
additional criteria.)

I remain somewhat organized, lest my search results be too chaotic for me to
read. But I need not be as perfectly organized as I once was, for the machine
can now be useful and not a hindrance.

~~~
usaar333
I agree that find simplifies things, but I feel the ability to label is still
important.

Just as I may need to "label" an email message from my boss telling me to do
something, I may need to label documents by course.

Without labeling you lose (re-)discovery. I may want to read everything I
wrote for a philosophy course a few years back. If I don't remember what I
wrote about (and I don't), I can never find things again. (This has happened
to me a lot with finding gmail messages)

As for files, the result of your search is just files. You need to be able to
do multiple actions on them (use different programs).

So yes, our existent file managers are a bit limiting. They should focus more
on labeling files (e.g. gmail) then folders. Search is already well-integrated
into most operating systems. But in the end, at some level, you still work
with files.

------
jsight
It's amazing how quickly and thoroughly Google has ceded the lead in this
area. I know that the Android market supports application and data backup, but
IMO the implementation is not as slick or simple as iCloud at this point.

This is especially true for those of us with multiple Android devices (Phone +
Tablet). But the lack of a comprehensive solution for photo synchronization is
telling as well.

I am glad to see HTC addressing the issue, but the lack of leadership on
Google's part is really unfortunate.

~~~
notatoad
google has ceded the lead here because files suck. users don't want files or
filesystems. look to how iOS works for how most users want to access their
files: they open an app and the documents that are relevant to that app are
available to them. whether that data is stored in a filesystem or in a
database, locally or remotely is totally irrelevant. google docs works like
this. picasaweb (or g+ photos now i guess) works like this. google music works
like this. the very nature of dropbox is to not be the ideal solution to the
problem they are solving. they're the realist's solution, google is going for
the idealist's solution.

imho, google is leading the market here by not being a part of it.

~~~
fpgeek
> google music works like this

It's funny, I like a lot of the ways Google has abstracted away from files
(e.g. Google Docs or Picasa), but Google Music drives me batty.

Even though they're wonderful about streaming and "pinning" songs offline
(even over 3G), I just want to download the music and know where it is. I
often use players other than Google Music, so that's part of it, but I think I
also just want tighter control over music than I want over other things. I've
ended up using Amazon Cloud Player instead, even though I successfully
download or stream over 3G once in a blue moon (if that).

------
refulgentis
Fascinating to me how histrionical the article headline is. I don't see a
mention anywhere that this somehow competes against iCloud.

If the article headline is correct and HTC believes this is an answer, HTC's
leadership is braindead. Giving your users 25 GB of free storage is _not_ the
same as pervasive, painless syncing across every core service on your device,
as well as giving 3rd party developers access to APIs to do the same.

~~~
huggyface
I recently saw Android's voice recognition -- a feature that long preceded
Siri -- described as the "Android's response to Siri". These headlines seldom
have much basis in fact.

However I would point to two things on the Android side--

a) Preceding iCloud, again, has been a pervasive cloud-based backup system,
including a third-party API -
<http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/data/backup.html> I won't argue
that it's the same thing, because it isn't, but it does provide the highest
value functionality.

b) But you're not supposed to rely upon that anyways. As another poster
mentioned, most of what you do in Android is already cloud based. Whether it's
Google docs, or automatic uploads to Google+ or Flickr, etc.

~~~
rsynnott
That backup API is an oddity; it's been there for a while, but no-one seems to
use it. In any case, it's a very small subset of what iCloud does ('iCloud' is
an amorphous collection of stuff, and includes an internet version of the old
iTunes backup system, which the Android API is similar to).

------
statictype
Sounds like a smart deal.

Cloud syncing is now something that Android (or at least HTC's Androids) will
do better than iOS.

Apple really should have done a similar deal with Dropbox when they found out
they couldn't buy them, but I guess it really isn't in their DNA to rely
heavily on 3rd party services. Unfortunately, doing cloud syncing right also
isn't really in their DNA.

~~~
jsz0
6 months ago I would have agreed but Apple has surpassed Android in this
respect. With iOS you get for free:

* Calendars, contacts, notes, reminders, bookmarks, reading list, etc.

* Full device back-up (including all third party applications, settings, etc)

* iCloud Documents / native APIs

* PhotoStream (photo syncing between devices)

For a price:

* iTunes Match

It's amazing how quickly things change.

~~~
oblique63
To be fair, Android has had a lot of these features for a while.

* Calendars and contacts have always been synced with my gmail and across all my android devices since my G1.

* Bookmarks are now being synced through the new Chrome for android

* On Android you pretty much rely on Google Docs for your document needs, which of course is cloud-based

* Photos have been synced with picasa (now part of G+) across all my devices for a while now too

* Google music

(can't comment on google's book offering, as I haven't really used it yet)

Now, I'm not gonna say Google's implementation is better or anything, but a
lot of that functionality has been there for so long, it seems at least
comprable to apple's offering at this point (if a bit 'fragmented'). I only
just got my first iOS device a few weeks ago (an ipad2 from my work), and
since it's my only one I can't say I've tested out iCloud fully enough to give
an in-depth comparison. I do hope google eventually come out with an API for
their cloud storage for android though, as that seems to be the only major
thing that's missing.

I will say one thing though, I find it quite nice that I can access all the
synced data on my Android devices from any browser anywhere, conveniently
within the services I already use, and not just from my Androids/personal
computers.

------
riobard
Does Dropbox on Android sync on per-file granularity? If so, how does this
combo support things like calendar and contacts entries? Sure you can put each
piece of data in its own file and watch the directory with inotify, but that
seems to be very inefficient.

~~~
rogerbinns
Dropbox on Android is pretty pathetic. It doesn't actually do sync - you get a
file browser not too much different than the dropbox web site interface, and
can download files one at a time! You can also choose to upload files although
you can't select an entire directory at once. This is closer to a crappy ftp
client than the desktop sync solution everyone is familiar with. They did
however recently just add auto upload of photos and videos.

It should be noted that Dropbox on iOS is even worse (same download one file
at a time mechanism) since you can only upload photos and videos, rather than
any arbitrary content. Every iOS app that wants Dropbox integration has to add
its own code to do all of it. On Android there is a centralized accounts
system where Dropbox, Skype, Linkedin, Facebook and any other app with
relevant permissions can publish an account. Other apps can then access those
accounts (without getting the username/password - just a token) so they don't
require heavyweight integration.

Android doesn't do calendar and contacts like Apple does. There can be
multiple providers and they can each do whatever they want. For example Google
stores those in the cloud, as does Linked and Skype so there is nothing to do
to have them in sync. You can see the union of all relevant providers at once.

BTW one huge advantage Android has over iOS is that you do not have to keep
re-entering passwords all the time. It totally bewilders me that iOS users
aren't up in arms at how often you have to keep entering it.

~~~
usaar333
Android Dropbox isn't quite this bad. It has a concept of "favorites". Once a
file is Favorited, it is automatically synced. I imagine this is done due to
concerns about space on mobile devices.

~~~
rogerbinns
Favourites only puts it in Dropbox's cache. You still have to manually
"export" it if you want it in a particular location on the SD card.

The desktop client allows you to choose which directories you want to sync.
Being able to do that would go most of the way towards being more useful for
Android. (There was a votebox issue when I last looked.)

