Starting October 12, T-Mobile and Sprint customers are eligible for a new and exclusive plan that will allow them to pay $5 a month for 500GB of Google One cloud storage.
The plan,announced Monday morning, allows for cloud backups of photos, videos, and contacts; extra storage for services such as Google Drive and Gmail; file storage and access from any compatible device; and the ability to share the extra storage with up to five additional people, who don’t all necessarily have to be on the same T-Mobile account.
At the time of writing, anybody can get aGoogle One paid accountand in fact, if you’re signed up for a Gmail account at all, you’ve technically opted in to the free 15GB plan. The 500GB/month option is exclusive to T-Mobile/Sprint customers, however, and the 10% credit perk on the Google Store was previously exclusive to the premium Google One plan.
The Google One storage plan is available for Android and iOS devices, for customers on consumer postpaid plans, and can still be used by people who haven’t yet migrated to T-Mobile from Sprint accounts.
T-Mobile customers, but not Sprint holdovers, can also opt to pay $10 a month for 2TB of storage, which is roughly the same as the Premium Google One plan. It would presumably feature similar if not identical perks, like a VPN for your phone and unspecified “access to Google experts,” which probably isn’t as fun as I would like it to be.
The new Google One option follows up on the announcement last March that T-Mobile and Google would expand their collaborative efforts, with T-Mobile promoting Android devices and using Google-backed services like Messages and YouTube TV as default apps on the service.
The newly-announced Google One marks the first time that T-Mobile has specifically endorsed Google as its preferred cloud storage solution and offered exclusive terms thereof, as opposed to vaguely gesturing in its general direction. It also completes thepromised list of benefitsfrom the T-Mobile/Google collaboration from the initial press release in March, as T-Mobile continues to ramp up its plans for5Grollout, including expanding into5G home internet.
According to T-Mobile, it was the original launch partner for the first Android-powered phone, the T-Mobile G1, aka The HTC Dream in 2008, and to this day, has more Android devices on its network than any other major provider. The partnership goes back a long time, with representatives of both companies describing it as “a long and very successful relationship.”
