Recently I’ve become reliant on a service called Ubuntu One, and it has entirely changed my computing experience. For those of you unfamiliar with Ubuntu One, it’s the synchronization client that ships with Ubuntu. Out of the gate, should you choose to use it, you’re given a free account with 2 GBs of storage. You can sync any files/folders you choose to (well, it has to be from your permanently-mounted filesystem as far as I can tell), as well as contacts from Evolution, bookmarks from Firefox, and notes from Tomboy.
When the service launched, it was certainly a shaky start. It first hit machines in
Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala (a fairly buggy release, in my opinion), and it was neigh unusable for the first while. Files failed to sync, the system was sluggish, and it just didn’t generally work. Many Ubuntu users made it the butt of jokes, and turned to Dropbox instead.
Now, I’m amazed at how far they’ve come in so short time. I find it to be rock-solid and reliable. Their new plans give you 20GB packs for $2.99/month, so affordable that I can sync and backup almost my entire machine. I’m currently in the process of getting my entire music and photo collection uploaded. So far, it’s been great. Not only that, but I can keep the files on my two machines identical, so my experience is always consistent. Sure, it was a rocky start, but I really recommend giving it another try and just giving in to its way of doing things.
But wait! That’s not all! Ubuntu One is billed as sort of your computer in the cloud, but where do you deal with the cloud the most? On your mobile phones, of course! For $3.99, you can get their mobile package for both Android and iPhone. You can sync contacts and all that, more the most desirable feature is that you can stream your entire music library from the cloud over your phone. Not to mention a new feature soon to hit beta that will sync your freshly-snapped photos.
The only half-baked feature that I sincerely hope the team takes a closer look at is
the Ubuntu One Music Store. It’s built into Rhythmbox, and the newest versions of Banshee, and has the potential to put the iTunes store to shame. It’s gorgeous, it’s full of great music, and the entire experience is very polished. That being said, it hasn’t been updated in many months. It’s like they just sort of forgot about it and started hammering out code for other things related to the project. As you can tell from the screenshot, the current “US Top Picks” include albums released at the beginning of summer. It’s been that way since June. This store could be the ticket to some real income for Canonical, and a great experience to bring in new users, but it isn’t living up to its full potential. I have faith in the team to remedy this and make it fantastic soon.
Whether you go for the free or the paid version, if you use Ubuntu, Ubuntu One is a fantastic service that will truly add to your entire experience. Some features might not be perfected quite yet, but I love having everything always in sync and backed up on an offsite server, and I cannot recommend this highly enough.