BlackBerry Q5 in the cloud

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This is cloud week on Talk Mobile, so we’re going to check out some of the best cloud-centric apps available in BlackBerry World for BB10. It’s going to be tricky because the big ones (Dropbox, Box, and Evernote) are already baked right into the OS and would be a little redundant to address here, but there are plenty of high quality third-party titles available in BlackBerry World.

From simple file access to streaming music, we've got a little bit of everything here.

PlayCloud

PlayCloud is a high-quality file browser that includes most of the major and a few of the more minor services out there. In addition to providing a bit of overlap with the built-in Dropbox and Box access, PlayCloud also lets users take a look at what’s on their Google Drive, SkyDrive, and even your own FTP server. PlayCloud also acts as a local file manager for your device’s memory, the SD card, and your PC if paired up over Link. Overall, an absolutely solid cloud storage tool.

More information / download PlayCloud

Files and Folders

A great alternative to the remote file access provided by PlayCloud is Files and Folders. I find the UI in Files and Folders highly polished, and offers the same access to services like SugarSync, SkyDrive, Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox. You can star folders for easy access, or peek backwards to go back to the root directory. A variety of different view types is also handy, especially thumbnails for your various photo albums, whererver they're stored. 

More information / download Files and Folders

Authomator

If you’ve got a lot of sensitive stuff in your cloud locker, obviously you’ll want to keep it secure. Authomator is a fantastic, clean app to help you handle two-step authentication for many of your web services. Basically, anything that provides you with a secret key code or a QR code for two-step authentication, Authomator can handle. This includes, Dropbox, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and plenty of other high-profile, security-conscious services. The UI is clean, and the active frame support is a nice touch.

More information / download Authomator

Go Music

Anyone migrating to BlackBerry 10 from Android might already be heavily invested in Google Music. Luckily there’s a super smooth BB10 app called Go Music, so folks can still get access to their music locker. You can thumbs up and thumbs down songs, cache songs locally, and get your All Access tunes if you're a subscriber. If you’re in Canada, you might not have even broached Google Music as an option, but there are ways to get in there and start using it.

More information / download Go Music

Room Tunes

Is you’re really serious about your cloud music services, odds are you have at least one Sonos system in your house. These Wi-Fi-enabled speakers are absolutely awesome, and though there’s no official client for BB10, someone else has put together a fine app that lets you pump out your locally-stored collection to home speakers, or tap into cloud services like Spotify, Rdio, Slacker, SiriusXM, and many more. Room Tunes provides full access to zone control, speaker pairing, and equalization, but first things first: go get a Sonos.

More information / download Room Tunes

That's just a smattering of some of the more popular cloud-centric apps for BlackBerry 10, but which do you use more often? Are those bundled within the operating system enough for you, or are there particular use cases that BlackBerry World apps have managed to address?

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