Quick thought for the day: Microsoft’s OneDrive doesn’t appear to act “smart” when it’s installed on a tablet, or what I prefer to call a Limited Storage Space Device. The premise of OneDrive is clear: store your stuff in the cloud and keep your device clean of clutter, holding local only what you need. Google made the same business case with their Chromebooks and Google Drive, but “cloud-first” is in its teenage years.
On a Limited Storage Device, such as a tablet or a phone, OneDrive should be smart enough to take offline, locally cached files, and make them “online only” again, freeing up the space. It doesn’t do this, and thus silently, and sometimes quickly, eats up storage on the device. Case in point: I recently drove Tail of the Dragon and took hundreds of photos. About one gigabyte of these I copied from my camera to OneDrive. One day later, my Dell Venue Pro 8 tablet started complaining of low drive space. OneDrive had copied the files from the cloud to the device, automatically, even though there was no reason to do so. The device wasn’t requesting those files. Yet, even if for whatever reason there was a valid request, shouldn’t OneDrive have “put them back” in the Cloud?
Microsoft – if you ever listen about device categories you’ve had a tough time understanding – you can’t treat these limited storage devices like mainstream PCs. You have to, pardon the pun, “think differently” and make your software do the same. The above scenario, where your Cloud solution makes a non-mainstream device relatively unusable due to a mainstream PC approach, is very common amongst your current product offerings. My gosh, just look at Office on a tablet.
Thanks for listening 
-Auri
Auri's Blog 