Microsoft is making it an early Christmas for Windows Phone users by giving away 20GB free SkyDrive storage for a year. Whether you're using a Windows Phone 8 or Windows Phone 7 device, you should come across an email stating how you can activate the extra storage. Users will have until the end of January to claim their prize or risk losing this opportunity altogether.

SkyDrive has become one of Microsoft's key products since the company began releasing a host of updates back in 2012. New updates this year brought SkyDrive on par with Google Drive, if not better in some areas, arguably. Like Google Drive, users can now collaborate on documents in real-time; along with that, users will no longer have to click on the save icon because Web Apps within SkyDrive now has an auto save feature, so no more shall a user lose work even if they forgot to click the save button.

This isn't the first time Microsoft had given away free storage. Back in 2012 when the software giant made some big changes to the service, Microsoft gave long time users the option to have a lifetime of 25GB of SkyDrive storage. That's a lot of space, and we doubt many SkyDrive users would have used up that much in a year.

Additionally, Microsoft is giving away 200GB of SkyDrive storage for 2 years with every purchase of the Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 tablets running Windows 8.1 and Windows 8.1 Pro respectively.

Giving away free storage has the ability to keep fans of Microsoft around, while the company attempts to bring more users to the service and hopefully convert them into subscribers. Will it work? Time will tell. However, we don't see Microsoft bowing out of this one without a fight as it is seeming more and more apparent that cloud storage and anything that has to do with the cloud is the future of computing in the years to come.

We shall keep an eye out to see if the likes of Google or DropBox are planning to give away free storage for the holidays as well. Stay tuned.