The buyers of HP’s new tablet, TouchPad will get 50 GB online storage from Box.net. The deal is expected to be announced along with the launch of TouchPad. The TouchPad buyers would be able to download the Box.net App from the App Catalog Store from HP. The announcement is intended to serve as an incentive for the TouchPad buyers who may anyway be looking for a reason why shouldn’t they buy an iPad 2 instead?
The interest in Cloud Storage industry has been increasing steadily, as is evident in the success of Dropbox after it was launched in 2008. Google already offers a full range of cloud based apps to the users including the Music beta service. The iCloud from Apple has just been announced and not launched yet, but is generating a lot of interest due to 5GB of free online storage offer to the users.
The offering from Box.net is a great deal for users, since they get 50 GB of data storage — especially if they are anyway going to buy the TouchPad. Those who intended to go for Android, however, already have the option of going for Google’s cloud-based offering.
The 50 GB account roughly translates into about 50 thousand photos and documents. The TouchPad buyers are already aware they will be getting either the 16 GB or the 32 GB version, so the cloud storage option makes sense for them. Even good laptops used to come with only 50 GB or 60 GB hard discs only some years ago. Those who are already Box.net subscribers, will see their accounts have been automatically upgraded to 50 GB accounts when they buy their TouchPads.
The Box.net cloud-based storage service has several high profile customers to show off including MTV and Dell.