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Dell Sets Stage To Take On Apple's iCloud
adeelarshad82 writes "Dell has quietly created a cloud-based service offering that could offer consumers a compelling reason to keep investing in Dell devices. The new release, which began shipping last week, allows users who snap a picture with a Dell Streak or other Dell mobile device to automatically upload it to a pool of free, shared cloud storage. The new software also allows devices to remotely control and play back shared audio and video, plus other services."
So the title should maybe read better and more accurately... "Dell rushed to market a delayed release of a copy of a competitors product"
I think the company should be sold and the money returned to it's shareholders.
On Macs, iCloud will make sense because it's baked in. On PCs running Windows, anything Dell does will feel like bloatware. Dell is not Apple.
The one thing Dell did right was to make a deal with Stardock. The Dell Dock is really nice, to the point where I wish I had it despite having paid the $20 for ObjectDock Plus. Dell has had the notoriety of bloatware, but it's come down quite a bit recently. Unless you get a really cheap laptop, you'll get your machine basically shipped with Windows, drivers, Dell Dock, Roxio burning software, PowerDVD, and a McAfee demo...and little else (possibly one or two desktop shortcuts). About the only thing I'd consider to be Dell bloatware anymore is the McAfee trial, but whether it's a good idea to bundle the first two months of virus protection instead of baking a year subscription into the cost (or loading with Avast, AVG, etc.) is a whole different topic entirely. But even in their consumer line, Dell provides mostly-untouched, pre-activated Win7 discs and driver discs in the box.
The real king of bloatware these days is HP, who will ship laptops with 40GB of used space, for a machine whose msconfig list requires a scroll bar out of the box. It takes less time to find an untouched OEM copy of Win7 that takes HP keys on $TORRENT_TRACKER, download it, burn it, and install it, then install the drivers manually, than it does to decrapify the damn things. HP doesn't ship recovery media anymore, they have recovery partitions, that require the end user to burn discs themselves (a process that can take over three hours) that slipstream all the bloatware into the disc. God help you if you actually have to use them, since THAT process can take hours as well. Their printer driver discs require half a gig, and the 'custom' install basically lets you choose whether you get a desktop icon for the registration program or not, instead of actually giving you the choice of leaving half the crap on the disc. Curiously enough, Epson and Canon can fit their drivers into 10MBytes, and even HP themselves can make a 15MB driver stack - IF your printer speaks PCL or PostScript. If not, there's the obligatory msconfig scrub for the three services and five executables that add themselves to startup for a PRINTER. ugh. The sad part is...I generally like their laptops.