The delight of having half a dozen devices at your fingertips is sometimes eclipsed by the hassle of having half a dozen devices at your fingertips — all holding different versions of the same file. For many of us, that means keeping a drawerful of thumbdrives, e-mailing countless attachments to a Gmail account, or copying things manually to some giant virtual disk in the sky.
Dropbox vaporizes all that. Install the software on your work laptop and your home computer and download the app on your mobile devices. Any file you store in the Dropbox folder on any one of those machines (or via the Dropbox website) is available immediately everywhere else.
Need to finish a spreadsheet from home? The version you saved to your Dropbox folder at work is waiting on your iMac in the den. Want to read a report while you commute? Open it on your phone.
The service is also the perfect foil for a bugaboo of mobile devices: saving files. Since Dropbox lets you save email attachments and photos on phones and tablets, the service also functions as a de facto file system on devices that otherwise have none. Oh, and it's platform-agnostic. Take that, iCloud.
Sure, you have to store all your stuff in the Dropbox folder on your hard drive instead of within your own file hierarchy. (Pro tip: Use symbolic links to get around this.) And sure, privacy, security, yadda yadda yadda. Still: Imagine a world in which you have access to your data all the time, anywhere. With Dropbox (cue soothing voice-over), that world is here.
