New In The App Store – Supersize Me ZumoDrive
By 
I had the opportunity to test out ZumoDrive’s cloud storage service when it was in private beta recently.
I liked the slick interface and the fact that, on my Mac, the "storage" icon appears both in my menu bar and as a mounted drive.
In order to move files to the cloudIs storage I simply needed to move them into the drive. I also appreciated the fact that the files are saved as the files unlike other services which store the file, an image, and more when syncing. A resident application for the iPhone was promised but not yet available. In addition, early advertising spoke about unlimited storage and yet, once you signed up for the service, truth in advertising was — 1 GB of free storage and unlimited storage so long as you’re willing to pay for it.
That in itself felt like a loss leader to me and I stopped using the beta.
Now the service is back, has change their pricing, and has an application for the iPhone — and I’m actually rather impressed.
The iPhone application is free for all right now. After this initial period it will be $4.99 unless you have a paid account. (In that case it will be free.)
The app allows quick access to files, photos and even music, right from the iPhone or iPod Touch.
The fact that the iPhone application is about as simple as it could be is one of the main draws for me. The application has just three tabs at the bottom of the screen — files, music, photos.
The "files" tab gives you quick access to all of the files on your drive. It shows you the name of the file, the size of the file, and the origination date of the file. you can access any file right from there.
The "music" tab presents you with a simple interface allowing you to choose from artists, albums, songs, or simply shuffle all of your music. No, it doesn’t support DRM but, then again, don’t we all want to find a way to move our music away from DRM in the first place?
Finally, the photos tab lets you view all of your pictures as thumbnails or present them as a slideshow. It works in both landscape and portrait mode.
The big advantage of this service and those like it, is that it allows you to expand your storage as much as you like. So long as you have a data connection your iPhone or iPod touch now has the same amount of additional storage as your drive. If you purchase a 10 GB drive you now have an additional 10 GB. If, however, you take the plunge and get 500 GB of storage, you now have an iPhone with over 500 GB of storage. (You will incur monthly charges for this privilege, however.)
About those monthly fees — the new pricing plan offers 1 GB of storage for free. If you want more than that it’ll cost you– $2.99 – 10GB; $6.99 – 25GB up to $79.99 – 500GB
That’s still a bit more than many other services including one that I have used on and off for six months– SugarSync but the interface is a bit simpler and the service does feel faster over all.
You can get the iPhone app HERE and get a ZumoDrive account HERE.
