Review: SkyDrive App For Windows Phone

The official SkyDrive application for Windows Phone is here, and from my days of using this thing I have to say that I am impressed, and a little disappointed all at the same time. The app is pretty smooth when navigating around, the only time I came across any form of jittering is when the app is loading document and picture thumbnails, and to me that is understandable and not a deal breaker.

Design

The design of the menu is nice, always a pleasure looking at it and just generally swiping from left to right, sometimes for no particular reason whatsoever. There are three tabs at the top, it consists of Files, Recent, and Shared, and I think that is enough despite what some users are saying, I mean, this is a mobile application, so it should be kept simple. If you want the full experience of SkyDrive, do so on your desktop computer or shut the hell up, thank you.

Sharing Documents and Files

One feature, many, including myself always wanted to see in the built version of SkyDrive on our Windows Phone devices is the ability to share documents and files with person’s in our contacts, or just some random stalker from Canada. Well, you can now rejoice and smile with glee because it is possible to share from the app. All you’ll be required to do is long press on a file or document until the option pops up, this also gives you the option to delete files and ummm, nothing else.

Creating Folders

Awesome!!! The option to create a new folder right from your Windows Phone is now a reality, believe it or not, a little tear just flowed from eye. Creating a folder is s easy as picking your nose (heh heh, I’ve done that), just hit the create folder link, you’ll then be asked to name the folder and from there you are set to go.

Opening Files

Opening files is easy, just tap on the file and voila, you are now viewing it. For some odd reason however, it opens the browser for a second then redirects you to the file, this is only done for documents though.

Adding Files

This is where things get bitter sweet. While the app allows you to add files, you can only upload pictures and nothing more, that sucks. I would have loved to be able to upload videos, yes I know it takes a lot of data to do this, but not everyone has that problem so Microsoft needs to fix this in the next update. There is however some good news to be had here, so don’t frown and curse at your monitor, the following should calm your soul if only for a little bit. OK, Windows Phone fans know that the ability to upload pictures to SkyDrive is built into the OS, sadly, whenever images are uploaded, they experience a significant amount of quality loss. With the SkyDrive app, that is not the case, pictures are uploaded without any form of compression or what I like to call it, “extreme #%@$& bullsh*t”.

Streaming

If you uploaded videos and music to SkyDrive via your PC, you’ll be happy to know that you can stream back these files to your Windows Phone, although some videos didn’t work for me. There are no reasons to stream music from SkyDrive since you can only stream them one at a time which is pointless. To all those who are dying to stream music properly, I suggest you get a Zune Pass, it’s pretty slick like.

Conclusion

SkyDrive app for Windows Phone is not perfect, after all, it is just version 1.0, but that doesn’t mean certain features should be missing. Still, it is loved and this badboy can only get better as Microsoft keeps up the hard work on making SkyDrive a true contender for the best Cloud solution prize. At the moment, it is good for what it is, so go get it and hopefully you won’t be disappointed.

Hey, my name is SkyDrive, I could have been the best application for Windows Phone but then I took an arrow to the knee….heh heh heh.

Download SkyDrive app for Windows Phone here

Tags: App, Application, cloud, Freeware, Marketplace, Microsoft, review, SkyDrive, Windows, Windows Phone, Zune