HTC's One series gets cloud integration via Dropbox

Buyers of HTC's next generation of phones will get free access to 25GB of Dropbox cloud storage, providing a feature already included in Apple's iPhone.

Dropbox will be tied into the upcoming HTC Sense 4.0 user interface, the Taiwan-based company announced at Mobile World Congress on Sunday. For instance, people can choose to swiftly upload a photo they have just taken into Dropbox.

Dropbox integration will make its first appearance in the company's flagship new phone, the HTC One X, which has a quad-core 1.5Ghz Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, Android 4.0 — Ice Cream Sandwich — HTC Sense 4.0 and Beats By Dr Dre Audio integration.

The Dropbox tie-up brings HTC closer to Apple, which offers cloud storage to its customers via iCloud.

However, when iPhone users upload an image to iCloud they use an operating system developed by the same company that runs the cloud service and builds the handset. HTC users do not get the same service, as the Android software that HTC Sense 4.0 runs on is controlled by Google, and the Dropbox cloud is controlled by neither HTC nor Google.

Dropbox runs on the Amazon Web Services cloud, so if Amazon experiences an outage, as it did on multiple occasions in 2011, then HTC users could be left out in the cold.

The HTC One series, which includes two other less powerful phones, will be globally available in the beginning of April, the company said.