Verizon Releases Smartphone Backup Service For Android

From pictures, to contacts and text message conversations, smartphone users keep a lot of data on their smartphones. The reality of an inadvertent loss can stall business or throw a family schedule into chaos. To help prevent this, Verizon Wireless has released a cloud backup service, called Verizon Cloud.

“Whether customers are looking to save text messages, call logs, contacts, music, multimedia or other files, Verizon Cloud allows for up to 125 GB of storage,” Verizon notes. 

The service starts users off with 500MB of free storage. That is not a lot of space. This is barely enough to backup more than one area of data, such as contacts, but the service up scales from there.  Users can upgrade to 25GB for only $3/month or 125GB for $10. It can be tough to determine exactly what a user needs to buy in terms of backing up data. The best recommendation is to start out free and slowly upscale from there until the right amount of storage is achieved.

Verizon Cloud will have to compete with other similar cloud storage services such as Google, Dropbox, and Apple’s iCloud. These services offer several gigabytes of data for free with incremental increases, though Verizon Cloud appears to offer cheaper rates at their higher end plans. An added benefit to the carrier’s service is reported to be its cross platform support. The service would allow data to be backed up on an Android and transferred to an iPhone and vice versa. This interoperability may be the key feature that Verizon is relying on to attract customers.

“Additionally, as customers use multiple devices, sometimes running on different operating systems, Verizon Cloud will allow for the transferring of some content between Android and iOS devices, making it accessible across smartphones, tablets and computers.”

The app currently only supports Android phones. Verizon reports that iOS and other smartphones will gain access to the service by the end of the year. The 

Verizon Cloud currently works with the following Android devices:

Motorola Droid X

Motorola Droid X 2

Motorola Droid 2 Global

HTC Thunderbolt

HTC Incredible

HTC Incredible 2

Samsung Droid Charge

Samsung Fascinate

Motorola Droid Xyboard 8.2″ Tablet

Motorola Droid Xyboard 10.1″ Tablet

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1

Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1