Dropbox Offering 50 GB Of Free Storage For 2 Years

Dropbox providing space as promotion with Samsung Galaxy S3 phone

 
Dropbox has been seeing competition over the past year and the most recent in that competition is Google and their Google Drive which offers up 5 GB of free space for the free account. Dropbox only offers 2 GB as part of the free space and then you have to do other activities to increase that space. They make you jump through some hoops to grow your space with the most recent efforts involving your pictures. All of this may now have to change with Google entering the game in a David and Goliath story. When Google enters a market, they have an impact to the market and impact smaller sized companies quite often. But that is not always the case with Google taking over and the Dropbox story may be another situation where Google does not grab a large market share.

Dropbox has teamed up with Samsung to provide you with 50 GB of free storage space. That sounds like a fantastic deal as compared to the normal 2 GB which they offer when you sign up. Obviously there are rules and regulations associated with this, but they are worth considering. There is a limited amount of time for the 50 GB of storage and it is 2 years. After that, you would have to pay for the continued usage of that space which is current $99 per year (or $9.99 per month) for the Pro 50 package. This is a great marketing idea from Dropbox as once you have the space used, you are more than likely to continue using it after the 2 year free period. But, there is still one more catch to the rules and regulations.


You have to purchase the new Samsung Galaxy S3 smart phone which was announced this week. The 2 year subscription comes bundled with the purchase of this recently announced smart phone as a way to promote it. The joint offering is an excellent way to promote both product offerings. Samsung sold over 20 million of their Galaxy S II smart phone in February after being launched last April. The expectations for the Galaxy S3 are even higher and with the Dropbox deal, they are adding to the movement for this device. There are many other features which will have higher sales and it is expected to be available this summer.

The idea of cloud storage has been growing for smart phones as you can store things on your local computer and then have them available on other devices including your smart phone. Apple raised the idea up with iCloud last year and the iPhone 4S and it looked to be a big hit. Samsung has followed up on the cloud storage, but rather than create their own service, they took a smarter route and partnered with a well know provider in Dropbox. This is a much better route to take and opens things up for consumers in a way that Apple's iCloud cannot do.

Dropbox has the distinction of providing their Dropbox functionality on far more devices than the competition and sets them ahead of all the others out their providing cloud storage. With the growing importance of pictures for social media and the improving picture taking capabilities of smart phones, adding Dropbox makes sense. You can take pictures with the coming Galaxy S3 and put them in your Dropbox folder on the phone and immediately have them available on your desktop computer in the Dropbox folder. This is a big deal and is only going to grow much larger this year.

While you may not be interested in purchasing the Galaxy S3 and getting the 50 GB of free storage, the idea of higher end smart phones having free cloud storage through providers like Dropbox is hopefully going to become the standard with all new phones this year.

Do you believe all smart phones should come with bundled cloud storage?