Dropbox Drops On iPhone

Finally, the team at Dropbox have released a native iPhone app. And it’s pretty awesome.

For those of you unfamililar with Dropbox, allow me to explain the appeal: it’s the best system around for syncing and sharing files between computers and iPhones. It knocks Mobile Me into the shadows.

You get 2GB of storage space for free, and can pay a monthly fee if you need more.

What’s really fantastic about Dropbox is the way it integrates with your file system. Your Dropbox is a folder just like any other folder; simply putting a file inside it is all you need do. That file will be synced to your online Dropbox account, which you can access through a browser or directly from any other computer that you’ve linked to the same account.

The browser access means that Dropbox users have been able to reach their stuff via their iPhones for some time now, but the launch of the official Dropbox app adds some cool new features; you can take a photo or video clip and upload them directly to your Dropbox account. Put them in the Shared folder and they’re instantly available to people you’ve granted Sharing privileges to. I like the way the photos are renamed with a time and date stamp, and not just left with the “Photo.jpg” filenames created by the iPhone’s camera app.

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There’s lots of discussion about this on the Dropbox forums, with some inevitable complaints from people asking why there aren’t more features, and why the app requires iPhone OS 3.1 (apparently because there’s a crucial bit of code is missing in 3.0.1); but on the whole the reception has been very positive. Dropbox users, like Mac users, tend to be somewhat evangelical.

If you’re running Snow Leopard, you might have noticed some oddness while running the official Dropbox release; download the latest beta to fix that. You might be interested in this upload-to-Dropbox Service that makes adding new files even easier.

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