Samsung is prepared to give purchasers of the upcoming Galaxy S III Android smartphone, announced today, 50GB of free Dropbox storage. Sweet deal. If you go to dropbox.com now and sign up for an account, you’ll quickly realize you only get 2GB for free, so 50GB with the Galaxy S III is a very big improvement.
There’s a bit of a catch, though. Once Galaxy S III owners activate their 50GB of free storage on Dropbox, they only get to keep it for two years. This is fine for those who only end up using a gigabyte or two, but what happens if over the course of two years people approach 50GB? Then suddenly, their storage expires and they have nowhere to put all their files that were once stored in the cloud. In a nutshell, the initial period of free storage from Dropbox pretty much guarantees that the people who take advantage of it will eventually pay. Just something to keep in mind if you accept the offer.
HTC has a similar offer on the table. If you buy one of its One devices (the One X or One S) you get 25GB of free Dropbox storage for the same two years. It’s not the more generous 50GB you get with Samsung’s Galaxy S III, but it can still be put to good use. Plus, I don’t know anyone who uses more than 10GB or so of storage in the cloud, but times they are a changin’.