Bump for PCs: With Cloud storage, why do we care?

There has been a lot of excitement around Android/iOS bump, a new software that allows you to share files from your phone on to your computer by “gently bumping your phone on to the spacebar of your computer”.

“Starting today, everyone who uses Bump can go to http://bu.mp on their computer web browser to bump photos from their phone directly to their computer. There’s no software to install – it all runs in your browser,” said Bump CEO Dave Lieb to AFP. “You simply select the photos in the Bump app on your phone and then gently bump the spacebar on your keyboard… and voila! Your photos will instantly appear on your computer. It’s how technology should work.”

[caption id=“attachment_324387” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Cloud storage is a much better option to share files between devices: Image from Dropbox site”]  [/caption]

YouTube videos have been generated, the online community has expressed its approval and we imagine that lots of excited Android and iPhone users are ‘bumping’ their phones on to their PCs just for the heck of it. ‘Quick! Take a picture of me closing the door and bump it on to the computer!’

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And while we are the last to deny that the new feature is really cool, we are forced to play grinch at this particular Christmas party and ask how, coolness apart, this new app will be very useful in this day and age of cloud storage like Dropbox and Google Drive. (Or iCloud if you are an Apple user)

Cloud storage services like those listed above, allow users to save files and documents on to a centralized server that can be accessed from any device - be it your phone, your PC, or your tablet. It’s not as ‘cool’ as bumping, but it serves the purpose as well, if not better, because in a lot of cases you can make changes on to the file from any device and have it reflected across all your devices.

The cloud server also means that if you lose a file on one of your devices, you can also download it again from whichever service you are using. And if you don’t want a particularly heavy/controversial file on any of your devices, you can just keep it on the cloud and download it only when you need it.

So well hurrah for all the bumping and all that, but novelty value aside we’re not all that impressed.