Overall Rating

Live Mesh is an online storage and sharing service that is intended to be an all-in-one nucleus for connecting your mobile devices, computers, and folders for access anywhere at anytime. Microsoft has plans for supporting both Windows and Mac operating systems as well. The single current existing feature is the free 5 GB of online data storage and customer support for now can be reached only through email.

It’s obviously primitive in the life of Live Mesh so it’s hard to evaluate something which you are viewing by peering into one infant porthole. Our guess is Live Mesh is a move away from the old freeze the market, bait-n-switch tactics of Microsoft old. Enough about Microsoft, let’s jump into our Live Mesh preview. The Live Mesh install was exceptionally easy, and was flawless. Initially, you’ll need to add your device to the Mesh, which results in Live Mesh software to be installed on your computer. It all went very fast, smoothly and with no incidents (Windows Vista).

From there, you can add other devices or start to upload documents you want to share through Live Mesh (must enable User Account Control on Vista which can be annoying for other apps where you have to turn it off). Setting up folders and sharing files were very straightforward. One thing that was a tad annoying is that you have to double-click folder icons in Live Mesh. I guess it makes sense since this is a Microsoft offering, but doing it from a browser fooled us until we almost gave up. Adding files is painless and straight forward through the Live Mesh web interface. You can also go to you Windows Explorer where you’ll find “Live Mesh Folders” under your account’s local files. Everything was pretty status quo for Microsoft in our preview. We do wish they had a drag and drop via the Web interface and could add folders in addition to single files. We are fairly certain these features will show up in future releases. It’s a decent beginning and Live Mesh isn’t going to match up to other online data backup, storing and sharing services yet, but it’s still very premature and you know Microsoft. Flush out the balance of the basic features and you’ve got a solid product.

What we find really really intriguing is where this is all heading, your Live desktop will turn into your Cloud desktop when storage, apps and content are all live somewhere between your computer and parts of the Cloud (a bit scary too).  More on Live Mesh to come…

How Microsoft Live Mesh Works Videos: