The South Korean consumer electronics giant announced that Galaxy Note 7 users will be able to use up to 15GB of free space to store and restore information on its cloud service. Interestingly, the company has described the cloud storage as an enhancement of its Smart Switch feature.
Smart Switch is Samsung’s exclusive feature that helps Galaxy phone users transfer data from their old devices to the new devices in just a few taps. The feature is available in both PC and mobile versions.
The portability and accessibility of mobile devices are making it people’s primary computers, which in turn is driving demand for the cloud. The paucity of phone memory—and the consumption of data overall has also exponentially increased—requiring more information to be pushed to the cloud.
With its recent acquisition of Joyent, a US-based cloud platform, Samsung bagged its own cloud platform and tapped this growing drift to the cloud. Surpassing its reliance on Amazon’s cloud company, AWS, the company now no longer has to rent data centers for supporting its mobile, Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud-based technologies. This has also opened avenues to venture into the artificial intelligence (AI) corridor, an area currently dominated by Google, IBM’s Watson and others.
On the other hand, Google and Apple, the two players that have already provided cloud services on their respective operating systems have made truce with Apple moving some of its iCloud services on to the Google Cloud earlier this year.
Undoubtedly, Google is buckling down to shrug off its status as the No 3 cloud vendor, behind Amazon and Microsoft vying for a fair market share in cloud computing. But looks like it has just found itself a new competitor!
