Mobility cloud services add value to mobile service plans

Grazed from CloudCow.  Author: Hoofer.

Mobile phone providers are beginning to add numerous cloud services to the lineup of basic service plans.  Not so long ago, mobile phone service plans would provide a number, but not much else.  Fast forward 2012…  Now it’s not at all uncommon to have a whole list of value-added services that either come as a default provision, or as pay-for modules that can be turned on for a nominal monthly service fee.

Examples of such services are cloud storage, content sharing, social networking plugins, cloud gaming, and the list goes on…

My favorite cloud services are the ones that save me from myself, such as continuity services.  For example, being able to setup an automated backup of my mobile device to the cloud has come in handy many times.  dropbox, Skydrive, iDrive, box.net, and soon to be Google’s gDrive, are some of the offerings for dedicated cloud storage; and many of these companies have also developed mobile device plugins that can be downloaded and configured on one’s mobile phone, tablet, etc.

Yet some mobile phone providers have also jumped into the fray with their own dedicated cloud storage applications. I recently heard about a cloud service called "Bluebook" from the UK mobile phone provider O2.  O2‘s Bluebook is a continuity service for backing up mobile device contacts and messages to the cloud onto O2‘s dedicated infrastructure.  If your contacts get clobbered – not to worry – just restore them back to your device from your Bluebook…

Again – the services that save us from ourselves are often times the most valuable.  Thank goodness for Bluebook.