Microsoft releases SkyDrive App for Windows phone and iPhone

Microsoft's love affair with iOS isn't over yet. It was OneNote and a “real soon now” commitment on its Lync unified-communications client for the iPad this Monday. Microsoft also announced this week that its Kinectimals game is available for the iPad and iPhone. On December 13, Microsoft made yet another Apple-focused announcement: An iOS version of SkyDrive for iPhone.

Users of Microsoft's SkyDrive cloud storage service now have another way to access and share their files – the newly released SkyDrive App for both Windows phone and iOS devices, which are intended to complement SkyDrive.com's existing mobile interface. "As devices proliferate, having a great experience on the Web is only one piece of a pretty complex puzzle," Microsoft's Mike Torres wrote. "People are choosing where to put their files based on how portable and accessible they are across the various devices they use, therefore, it's critical that we continue to extend the SkyDrive experience to the devices you use every day."

Microsoft's Mike Torres said: "Many still want the full SkyDrive experience from Windows phone, including tasks like browsing their entire SkyDrive, sharing links to folders or files, deleting files, and creating folders." The SkyDrive App allows you to view all of the files and folders in your SkyDrive and those that have been shared with you by others. You can view documents and pictures, create and delete folders, delete files, email links to files and folders (giving recipients either read-only or read-and-write permissions to the file), and download and upload pictures. Moving and renaming files and folders don’t appear to be possible on either platform, however. As a result, phones running Windows Phone 7.5 can now download the SkyDrive App from the Windows phone Marketplace and do just that. For those on iOS, the same app was also released in the App Store.

SkyDrive is a potential competitor in the mobile consumer space with Apple's iCloud, which is available for free with iOS 5. Microsoft's SkyDrive efforts appear to be part of its general market push into a world of connected devices that will increasingly be mobile. It also squares with the "three-screens and a cloud" vision laid out when Ray Ozzie was Microsoft's chief software architect. The idea is to synchronized data across devices. SkyDrive is already facilitating that, in part, by enabling single sign-on capabilities across devices.

Microsoft explained late last month that it has made sharing via SkyDrive more "app-centric." It already enables document collaborations via some of its Office Web Apps, although its "coauthoring" feature used with the Word Web App doesn't exactly work in real time. Other improvements made earlier this year to SkyDrive include simplifications to accessing folder directories and a speeded-up photo browsing experience, as well as the use of AJAX and HTML 5 technologies to improve the user experience. Microsoft has explained that some of the SkyDrive features it built earlier were just too complex, but it is listening to customer feedback and making improvements.

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