As a Windows Phone 7 user, you shouldn’t be jealous of Apple’s iCloud service. Most of the functionality in iCloud is already baked into your phone via SkyDrive and Hotmail. The good folks from the Windows Phone Team posted a story to show us how it all works together. It’s a great primer for SkyDrive/Hotmail integration in general (if you don’t already have a Push capable email account, they link off to explain how to forward your current email to Hotmail, which does), and to sweeten the deal they have included screenshots of the improvements we mentioned a week ago. Those features include:
- Share photos stored on SkyDrive by way of email, text messages, IM - "SkyDrive lets you store thousands of pictures in the cloud. You can show them off to friends on your phone in the Pictures hub, and now you can share SkyDrive photos with anyone over email, text, or Messenger/Facebook."
- Share videos on SkyDrive - "With Mango, all the goodness you had with photos has been extended to videos. Once you’re finished shooting your video, you can caption it and share immediately on SkyDrive, and the upload will happen in the background while you move on to other things."
- Browse and search documents stored on SkyDrive - "Windows Phone lets you view folders and files directly on your phone, so when you group things on SkyDrive, you know they’ll be available with the same folder structure on your phone."
- See what’s been shared with you - "More than 70% of the folders created on SkyDrive are shared with other people, which makes it all the more important to see everything shared with you on your phone. This pivot view will show you the complete list of documents shared with you, letting you open and edit in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint."
- Search your SkyDrive documents - "If you store a lot of stuff on SkyDrive, being able to do a quick search is important. In the Office hub, you can easily search across your SkyDrive for the document you need without having to wade through your folders and other files."
Overall, a nice little package. Of course, it's already been mentioned by Micrsoft themselves that Skydrive will probably fold into the general LIVE services, including Xbox. So this is just the beginning of Redmond's big "cloud push".
Source: Inside Windows Live
