New App from Baidu - Net Disk Platform

Tue 27 March 2012 10:00, Editors

On March 23rd., Baidu had something new for us - Net Disk Platform, called “Baidu Wangpan” in Chinese, and said to be the first product for its “cloud strategy”. Till now, the platform has been launched in a private beta with limited access, and is on the test mode.

What is Baidu Net Disk Platform?

Similar to the most famous “Dropbox”, it is a virtual storage for users to upload and share files, such as photos, videos, documents, or music, with space for 15 GB in the beginning. Since it is not officially online, on the official Wangpan site, Baidu emphasizes on the unlimited free expansion for users.

The WangPan app is now available on Windows and Android, and Mac is coming soon. Baidu’s move joins the competition with Dropbox, Microsoft, or local players such as Alibaba.

The experience for using Baidu WangPan

What is special about Baidu Net Disk? Is it user friendly? How can it compete with other similar products? To answer those questions, I applied for the test, and got one. Here is the interface.

This is the interface you see after login, and it is quite simple. If you have used 90% of the space, this disk will automatically give you an extra space for 1 GB.

To test if the system can automatically identify the type of file, I uploaded three types of files, with documents, videos and photos, but it did not move to the right folder automatically. Maybe this function is not available in the test version.

For uploading files, users can upload a max of 200 files at one time, and the loading time takes a while.

User friendly, there is little function available, you can only “upload”, “download”, and “share”. It will be more helpful if the users can set priority on the individual file, such as “start”, “pause”, or “try again” if the uploading is failed.

For me, the test version of Baidu Net Disk is not attractive at all. If I do not have a Baidu account, or get an incentive for using, I will quit very soon.

Apparently Baidu noticed that, that might be the reason to have the test version and a special column on its Tieba (posting channel). Users can directly give feedback to the product manager, and a small gift will be given out for useful suggestions. I will wait to see the new version of Baidu Cloud Storage.

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