In an effort to draw more users to its Windows Phone 8 platform, Microsoft has offered its customers with Windows mobile phones 20 gigabytes (GB) of free storage on its SkyDrive cloud service for one year. NDTV.com reports that the company sent out an email to Windows Phone 8 users stating that the free storage would be in addition to the 7 GB that they already receive at no cost.

"A great way of using this extra storage is to automatically back up the photos and videos you take on your phone," Microsoft stated in their email. "When your photos or files are on SkyDrive, you can still get to them if something happens to your phone."

SkyDrive is Microsoft's competitor with Apple's iCloud service. It provides cloud storage capabilities that make it easier to sync data across multiple devices and platforms, including the Xbox One and Windows laptop computers. If you want to share documents and files between these devices, as well as music, photos and video, you need only save it to your SkyDrive account in order to access it from another system.

Once you download the SkyDrive app, you can access those files and edit any Microsoft Office documents directly in the app, rather than having to open them in a separate program.

It's important to note that in order to get the most out of your SkyDrive service, it's best to have a Windows 8 device like one of the many Asus and Samsung laptops that we offer at PortableOne. For more information, check out our online store today!