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Samsung strengthens ties with Dropbox, rather, 'S Cloud'

by Alistair Lowe on 4 September 2012, 10:00

Tags: Samsung (005935.KS)

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Missed by many but caught by German site BestBoyZ is interesting evidence, discovered on the GALAXY Note II running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, of 'S Cloud'.

Digging further into the menu, it's revealed that this service is in fact operated by Dropbox. In a way, this should come as no surprise, as Samsung has typically been offering 50GB of free Dropbox storage with several of its latest devices. This does send a message, however, of a Samsung commitment to the filelocker service, despite the presence of new and potentially cheaper alternatives such as Google Drive, or, straight to the Dropbox source, Amazon S3.

It's suspected that S Cloud will arrive as standard with Android Jelly Bean updates on the various Samsung devices; we wonder if it will offer any enhanced integration beyond what we've come to expect with the standard Dropbox app and Google Drive.

HEXUS Forums :: 3 Comments

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Posted by crossy - Tue 04 Sep 2012 11:38
Digging further into the menu, it's revealed that this service is in fact operated by Dropbox. In a way, this should come as no surprise, as Samsung has typically been offering 50GB of free Dropbox storage with several of its latest devices.
Yes, I've got my 50GB+ courtesy of my S3. What's worrying me (slightly) is that this was a limited duration offer (two years I seem to remember), so unless you replace that S3 with an S4/S5/etc then what price is going to be charged to renew?

Checking the Dropbox website seems to show that they don't offer a 50GB option - only 18GB(ish) and 100GB. So what's going to happen when the Samsung deal I'm on currently runs out - the only options I see is that I'll have to either recover all my cloud-resident data or pony up $99 for the 100GB as an “upgrade”.

That said, if Dropbox wanted to offer me a $50 “renewal” plan for the 50GB I've got at the moment, then I think I'd probably take them up on the offer.
Posted by ck209 - Tue 04 Sep 2012 13:24
As the user above has noted, a limited duration is not convenient. Overall, I would be worrying greatly about security issues in terms of dropbox. Will samsung users' data be compromised if dropbox gets hacked (again)?
Posted by crossy - Tue 04 Sep 2012 14:07
ck209
Overall, I would be worrying greatly about security issues in terms of dropbox. Will samsung users' data be compromised if dropbox gets hacked (again)?
Hmm, there's a good deal of truth in a comment I saw in a company-internal document namely "it's called a cloud for a reason - everyone can see it“ - the rest of the article pointing out that this was only the case for ”public“ cloud storage. So if you're storing confidential information then either use secured cloud storage solutions (not ”public" one's like Dropbox), or arrange your own information protection. This was also covered elsewhere, e.g. http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-ways-to-securely-encrypt-your-files-in-the-cloud/.

Must admit that the vast majority of my Dropbox storage is given over to photo's - so while perhaps embarrassing, not “sensitive”. The sensitive data on there is AES-256bit encrypted, (although I did find I'd left a text file copy of my WPA2 key on there the other day - oops!)