So is Apple’s pricing a deal? Comparing prices for these services is tough. Different ones offer different capacity points. Some have lots of features (SugarSync and Box.net, for instance) and some are far more bare-bones (Amazon Cloud Drive and Microsoft Cloud Drive). Some have their own twists (YouSendIt, for instance, has a built-in digital-signature feature) and some (Amazon Cloud Drive and iCloud) don’t include purchased music in the capacity limits. And anyhow, iCloud isn’t an exact counterpart to any existing service. It’s going to be way more Apple-centric–betcha there won’t be Android clients–and is less about syncing and more about leaving your files in the cloud, period.

With those caveats in mind, here’s a quick price comparison. Since iCloud is priced by the year, I’ve listed all prices in annualized form even though most of these services are priced by the month. Note that I’m focusing on consumer-oriented plans here–some of these services have corporate-focused ones, too. And I’m not taking other factors, such as maximum file sizes, into consideration. Oh, and “Cloud Drive” below is Amazon’s Cloud Drive service.

Assuming that iCloud does what you need, its pricing looks reasonable at every price point. Amazon’s Cloud Drive is half the price–$20 for 20GB instead of Apple’s $40–but at this point, it’s a way less ambitious service.

It’s also interesting to note that Apple kept the capacities it’s offering relatively small: the 50GB account costs the same $100 you used to pay for a year of MobileMe.

Of course, all these services are pricey compared to local storage: the $100 annual cost for 50GB of iCloud would buy you 20X as much USB mobile hard-drive storage (1TB) every year. I look forward to the day when there are a bunch of services that offer multiple terabytes of online storage for very little money. That’s when this whole idea of keeping all your stuff in the cloud will become irresistible.

UPDATE: Over on Twitter, Justin Reid reminded me that Apple’s storage capacities are in addition to the free 5GB. So the totals look like this:

YouSendIt retains its signature feature: letting you avoid e-mail attachments and FTP servers by uploading big files to YouSendIt for downloading by other folks. But now it also has the standard suite of cloud storage/syncing tools: online space you can use like a hard disk, a syncing app, and apps for the iPhone and iPad. (There’s no Mac app yet–YouSendIt is working on one–or an app for Android.)

The service also tosses in a couple of features which aren’t standard fare. For one thing, it has a $14.99/month tier that includes unlimited online storage. (By contrast, Dropbox charges $19.99/month for 100GB, and SugarSync charges $14.99 for 100GB; it’ll be interesting to see if the other guys feel the need to match YouSendIt’s limitless option.) It also has a cool-looking digital-signature tool that lets you sign documents such as PDFs and Word documents by scribbling a signature with your finger or typing it in.

YouSendIt’s free accounts offer 2GB of online storage–which matches Dropbox but falls short of the roomy 5GB offered by Box and SugarSync–and maximum file size of 50MB. You’re also limited to five signatures a month. $9.99 a month gets you 5GB of space, files up to 2GB, and ten signatures. The $14.99 offers unlimited storage of files up to 2GB in size, and unlimited signatures.

At the moment, I remain a happy paying user of SugarSync’s 30GB plan–but if you check out YouSendIt, let us know what you think.

When a tech topic gets hot–such as, oh, storing all your files in the cloud–it’s rare for Microsoft not to have a relevant offering. But it’s quite common for Microsoft to have gotten into the game so early that by the time the result of the world is interested, whatever Microsoft has looks like a product from another time.

That’s kind of been true with Windows Live SkyDrive, Microsoft’s online storage system. It’s been around for nearly four years–longer than most of its major competitors, and definitely longer than Apple’s iCloud. But SkyDrive hasn’t changed that much over the years. It’s best known as the storage system that’s hooked into other Microsoft products, such as the Office Web Apps and Windows Phone 7.

Today, Microsoft released an update to SkyDrive. It doesn’t feel like a radical modernization of the service as it stood, but it does sport a bunch of improvements that are nicely done.

Such as:

• Microsoft reengineered the service to be snappier–it now takes advantage of HTML5 techniques and hardware acceleration. It does indeed feel quick…less like a browser-based service and more like an app that happens to live online.
• The interface has been spruced up for better consistency with Hotmail and improved integration with the SkyDrive Groups sharing feature.
• It can do HTML5 video for videos you’ve stored online, for playback that doesn’t require a plugin.
• It has very nice support for photos, with cool thumbnails that are smart enough to handle odd-sized pictures such as panoramas well, infinite scrolling, and HTML5-based slideshows that are speedy and fun.
• It now supports file uploads up to 100MB, double the old limit.

This is all good stuff, and if you’ve never checked out SkyDrive or have an account that’s fallow, you should check out the new version. But when I spoke this morning with Anand Babu, a Microsoft senior product manager, he spent a fair amount of time emphasizing that Microsoft plans to add more features, without getting more specific. I can see why: even with this new SkyDrive, there are swaths of the service that feel old school or poorly fleshed out, as if Microsoft wasn’t entirely committed to it.

For instance:

• Despite the new HTML5-friendly features, you still need Silverlight to get a nice, slick interface that makes it easy to upload lots of files at once into a SkyDrive, and Silverlight still isn’t compatible with Chrome for Mac.
• Microsoft offers a version of OneNote for the iPhone, and a phone-friendly version of the SkyDrive Web site–but those are its only non-Windows mobile offering so far. (It says that more stuff is in the works.)
• By itself, SkyDrive is mostly a browser-based service; if you want the sort of syncing which services such as SugarSync and Box.net offer, you need to pair it up with another Microsoft service called Windows Live Mesh. Seems like it would be sensible for Microsoft to unify the concept into one product.
• As you might almost guess from the first word in its name, Windows Live Mesh for Mac feels like an afterthought. I can’t find mention of it on the main Live Mesh site or at Microsoft’s Mac site. After several minutes of Googling, I found it here.
• SkyDrive gives you a roomy 25GB of space for files in full, but Live Mesh only lets you sync up to 5GB of data–the same amount you get with a free SugarSync or Box.net account. SugarSync and Box.net let you get lots more space if you’re willing to pay; Live Mesh offers no paid options.

SkyDrive in its current form still have a much heavier emphasis on traditional computers than iCloud does (at least as explained by Apple at its event earlier this month) does. That’s okay–Microsoft in its current form still has a heavier emphasis on PCs. But I’m curious to see where Microsoft takes this–and especially how much energy it invests in making SkyDrive useful for iOS and/or Android users.

Cloud Save, a new extension for Google’s Chrome browser (spotted first by DownloadSquad), takes us part way there. The extension adds an option in Chrome’s right click menu that lets you save files directly to online storage services such as Box.net, Flickr and Google Docs. You grant permission for Cloud Save to access each of these services the first time you save to them, and a notification box pops up when your file has saved successfully.

On the most basic level, Cloud Save eliminates a step if you’re trying to move a web file to an online service. If someone sends you a funny picture, for instance, you just Cloud Save it instead of downloading and then uploading. But by skipping that step, Cloud Save also bypasses the need for local storage when saving files from the web. It’s the kind of feature that Google should bake directly into Google’s Chrome OS, the web-based operating system that will launch in notebooks later this year.

Google is still grappling with the issue of saving files in Chrome OS. You’re allowed to save locally, but it’s a rudimentary system meant for temporary storage, and anyway, the idea of storing a file offline just to put it back in the cloud defeats the purpose.

Still, Cloud Save doesn’t solve the whole problem, or even the biggest part of it: Once your data is uploaded, other web services can’t access the data unless they support that specific storage service. So let’s say I want to edit one of my Picasa images in Pixlr. That’s not a problem, because Pixlr allows you to import images from Picasa, Flickr and Facebook. But I’m out of luck if I want to import an image from Box.net or Dropbox.

If Google were to create its own storage service (like the mythical GDrive), I’m sure you’d see support from a lot of web services. At that point, Cloud Save becomes the missing link that lets users save files without local storage. In Google’s ideal world, Cloud Save, or something like it, would be an integral part of the operating system, not a random third-party extension.

SugarSync

The service’s paid options range from a 30GB account for $4.99 a month (or $49.99 a year) to a 500GB one for $39.99 a month (or $399.99 a year); there are also multiuser business accounts.

SugarSync’s closest counterpart, Dropbox, still offers 2GB for free, but with any luck, SugarSync’s move will set off a free-space war. (Microsoft’s Windows Live Mesh already let you sync up to 5GB of data into a SkyDrive account, but Microsoft doesn’t seem to be giving the service much love these days.) Other services such as Mozy, Carbonite, Norton Backup, and Google Storage make it possible to back up larger amounts of data to the cloud for less money, but they lack the syncing and other features that make SugarSync so versatile.

[Update: A representative of Box.net sent me a note to point out that it started giving 5GB of storage to users of its free version in October.]

This virtual drive shows up in Explorer or Finder labeled as “GDrive”–a playful reference to a Google product that people have been expecting to arrive any day now for at least half a decade. (Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve seen something called Google Web Drive in use at Google’s offices; I assume it’s undergoing internal testing and will get rolled out to the rest of us someday.) All in all, the new Connect competes more closely with Box.net (which launched its own syncing feature recently) and sync-focused services such as SugarSync.

Memeo Connect 2.0′s other major feature is full-text search of the files in your Google Docs collection: Previous versions could only search file names.

The Memeo Connect 2.0 beta is free, but the final version will cost $9 per user per year. It requires a $50/year Google Apps Premier account. (I think plenty of users of Google Apps’ free version would pay for it, but Google only lets third-party apps and services that access the Apps API work with the paid edition.) I found the beta a bit quirky, and the Mac one was a bit more refined than the Windows version. But it’s worth checking out if you’re using Google Apps for business purposes–especially if you work in disconnected environments such as airplanes and/or want to treat your Google Apps online storage as a hard drive that happens to live in the cloud.

(Full disclosure: My fiancée performs work for Memeo on a contract basis.)

Many of the results are pretty much of what you’d expect from a survey conducted for a storage company that’s announcing smartphone support: 74 percent of respondents, for instance, said that “accessing and sharing file server data via their smartphone would lead to increased productivity and better business decisions.” More surprising: 48 percent of the people who took the survey said that RIM’s BlackBerry is the most innovative smartphone, vs. 29 percent who said the iPhone is.

But one tidbit intrigued me the most: A quarter of the survey respondents said that they use their smartphones more than they do their PCs for business use. I’m not sure if that sounds low or high, but as smartphones get smarter over the next few years, you gotta think that many of us will come to see them as our principal computing devices, and consider traditional PCs to be the secondary, special-purpose gadget.

In terms of hours logged with each device, my laptop is still more essential to my work (and play) than my phone. Emotionally, though, I’m at least as attached to my iPhone as I am to any full-blown computer I own. When it’s useful, it’s exceptionally useful–and I sure spend less time futzing with it than I do with any Windows or OS X machine. And it gets the opportunity to save my bacon more often than my laptop does, because I take it absolutely everywhere. (As you may or may not know, I wear my phone around my neck on a lanyard so it’s always within reach and I never lose it.)

Your take?