Microsoft Gives Windows Phone Users 20GB Extra of SkyDrive for Christmas

Not a lot of companies are giving out free gifts this holiday season. There are even fewer phone companies that are giving out free gifts. However, Microsoft is not one of those companies. In fact, this company is hoping to reward people who have switched over to Windows phones this year. They are doing this by giving out 20GB of free SkyDrive space.

This is a very smart marketing move by Microsoft. In fact, this shows Microsoft really pushing and taking advantage of one of its biggest assets, the SkyDrive. Just like other cloud services, the SkyDrive allows Windows users to store things in their clouds. From there, they can access the things they have stored on their clouds from other Windows devices.

So, let’s say that someone has favorite songs stored on his computer. He can simply upload those songs to his SkyDrive and have access to them from his Surface or Windows Phone. Microsoft has been giving out a lot of SkyDrive space to other Windows supporters as well. For example, people who buy the Surface 2 or the Surface Pro 2 get 200GB of SkyDrive space. In Short, it is like having a 200GB external hard drive. This allows Surface users to not worry about filling up the limited room on their Surface tablets with files that they do not use all the time. These files can be stored on the SkyDrive and accessed whenever they want.

Unlike the Surface Pro, which simply comes with 200GB of space, this special deal for Windows Phone users does not last forever. This deal expires on January 1. Users also only get to keep the 20GB of free storage for a year. After that, all unused space will disappear. This is another smart move by Microsoft because it ensures that it does not have to keep 20GB open for Windows users who are never going to use it.

Windows SkyDrive is competing against other services like Dropbox and Google Drive. Although SkyDrive may be late to the party, it offers a lot of great features and has learned from the mistakes that have been made by other syncing and cloud storage services in the past. Keeping the extra 20GB of storage will set users back $10 a year.