The voting has closed, and less than a handful of votes separated the top two in our Best Of The Best category for the Lifehacker Awards 2010. When the virtual dust settled, however, there could only be one winner. And that winner is . . .
Best Of The Best: Dropbox
Dropbox appeared as a nominee in three of our separate award categories — desktop app, mobile app and web app — but didn’t actually win any of them. In part, that reflects the difficulty in categorising it as a tool — its usefulness comes from the fact that you can use it in all those contexts and on virtually any browser-running device. Freed from category constraints, its ability to give you access to any important file from virtually any device and back up important data without needing any intervention made it the ultimate winner of our Best Of The Best award.
Almost Best Of The Best: Google Chrome
In a close-run contest, Google Chrome also deserves acknowledgement. Clearly Google’s foray into the browser market has struck a chord with Lifehacker readers, and the recent emergence of Chrome OS and the promise of future improvements suggests 2011 will be even more interesting.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote during the awards. It’s been a blast!
Cam
Monday, December 20, 2010 at 10:58 AMAhhh… If only Drop Box were cheaper!
Suwandy Tjin
Monday, December 20, 2010 at 11:13 AMThose who haven’t joined Dropbox yet should do so quickly.
Join here: http://db.tt/9GfF4dj
and you will be getting free 250 Mb of additional storage on dropbox =)
JessT
Monday, December 20, 2010 at 12:15 PMNote to everyone: The above is a referral link (just so you know :) )
John
Monday, December 20, 2010 at 1:02 PMDropBox is good, but…..
Basically anything that Dropbox can do, SpiderOak does better.
About the only exception to that rule that I can find is that DropBox’s file updates occur almost real-time whereas SpiderOak has a few seconds delay.
Furthermore, SpiderOak’s clever handling of multiple devices, per-device backup and sharing configuration and fully client-side encrypted storage (that is, SpiderOak never sees your data) is leaps and bounds ahead of DropBox.
Chris
Monday, December 20, 2010 at 9:27 PMyeah, but i’m not using a product called “spideroak” no matter how good.
Shaun Wilson
Monday, December 20, 2010 at 10:42 PMI use a free Dropbox account and a paid Spideroak account at the moment. But when Dropbox gets around to adding sync outside of the Dropbox folder, I’ll probably switch entirely to Dropbox.
I find Dropbox’s UI far stronger and its file transfer speed much faster. The Dropbox iPhone app is a lot more solid than the Spideroak one, which I find a bit slow.
Also, Dropbox has the advantage of being far more common. It makes sharing folders with others a lot easier because they’re more likely to already have it – and if they don’t, it’s far simpler to get started with (for non-techheads).
And Dropbox’s API means there’s a lot of third party services that will take advantage of your Dropbox account.