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Add 8GB of Storage to Your Cell Phone
gd writes "MobileTechNews is reporting that a company called US modular has put out a device that taps into your existing mobile phones microSD or Tflash slot to add up to 8GB of storage. The Stik&Stor adds a memory chip to the back side of the battery pack and only costs $199 to add 8GB to your music phone."
Tied up in DRM, all this memory kicking around is going to cause problems.
"Where did I put that Elton John Album? On my IPod? No... On my mobile? No... On my works mobile? No... On my PC? No... On my IPAQ? No... oh bugger it, I'll just buy another electronic copy."
Glad I stuck with LP's
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Most people get their cell phones cheap (or free) on various plans because people are CHEAP. they won't want to spend a couple of hundred bucks for extra memory when they likely already have an MP3 player, PDA, etc.
This thing will fail miserably.
Trolling is a art,
I'd be a bit hesitant to add a microdrive to my cell phone. I'm a fairly careful person, but I tend to keep phones for roughly 2 years (for Verizon's New Every 2 Program), and my phone tends to have fallen at least a handful of times over that period. I've already heard stories of people with Palm LifeDrives which failed from less.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I have one of the listed phones (V635) that takes transflash, and I can play any MP3 in the player, use any MP3 as a ringtone, re-encode any video I want to .3gp format in mplayer and upload it - including full movies. I have re-encoded whole DVDs into 20 MB .3gp files and watched them on my phone while on the bus.
There is no DRM issue whatsoever. You can plug a transflash card into any SD reader to download or upload whatever the hell you want on it. It's no different than CF or SD or XD or any other memory card, there is no DRM involved.
The parent poster is pretty ignorant to this technology. Personally I can't wait to get one of these - the highest storage transflash card right now (I am aware of) is only 512 MB. 8GB would rock.
From the article I couldn't guess the size of the 8GB microdrive. Anyone has any idea ? One from Lacie is rather big to be tagged along with a cellphone.
I also already have a toaster and an oven. That doesn't mean there's not a market for toaster ovens.
/.'ers can't understand that?
People don't want to carry 15 different devices when one can do the job of all good enough. Why is it some
My V635 is a perfectly capable MP3 player and also a very decent phone. Why should I have to carry around a whole other device to listen to a bit of music one in awhile. Simmilarly, the 1.3 MP camera is "good enough" for what I use it for, quick snapshots.
Nice! Now I can have 8GB of storage for all my phone numbers! Oh wait, that already fits on my 32k SIM. Nevermind.
The picture in the article does not truly represent how big the patch is - a better example is on the mfr's page here
T.J. Schmitz - the man, the myth, the legend - o
Those were the "any" MP3's you refer to above.
They aren't seen by my phone. So clearly, your claims of technical ignorance and that "any" phone can play "any" MP3 are far overblown.
Obviously, there probably needs to be some other additional update to the phone for MP3's, but since Samsung doesn't see fit to include a USB cable with their phone, and Verizon does see fit to neuter the Bluetooth capabilities of all their phones, I'm not in a position to do it "the right way" to find out how to do it "my way".
Am I bitching about Verizon? Not really. This is a CELLPHONE for me, not an MP3 player, not anything else. And from that perspective, Verizon is the best of my options where I am at. But I was curious, and find it somewhat ironic that they market all the amazing capabilities of these phones when in fact they *aren't* as simple as you want to claim, much less how they market them. Unless of course you *like* paying three times for your music.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Sigh. Now if only I had someone to call.
I think that the cell phone market has it all wrong if they are aiming to add massive amounts of storage to a cell phone.
If I was a supposed industry leader in the cell phone market, I would announce that my phones would NEVER have more then a few megs of storage in them. Here is why!
Cell phones are ALL ABOUT SUBSCRIPTION and PAY PER USE services. The only reason why you have a camera on your cell phone is so you either pay a monthly service charge to allow x number of pictures/kilobytes to be transmitted for free, OR you pay $.10 - $.20 for each picture sent. Same with text messaging, same with video on a cell phone, same with music on a cell phone. These features are not added to benefit mankind, but to drive up your cell phone bills and make the phone companies more money.
I.e. the cellphone is a money making device. It makes money from its very existence, you can't use or even have a cell phone without spending money.
This is unlike mp3 players, PDA's, computers, etc, where you buy the device, it comes with X amount of storage, and you fill the device with hopefully legal content that you can listen or watch at your convenience without paying a dime extra.
So, when someone decides to turn a cellphone into a ubiquitous multimedia player with ample storage, why should ANY cell phone maker rush to implement these feature? Why should a cellphone company allow the user to store gigabytes of high resolution pictures so they can return home to their PC and download the pictures FOR FREE to their computer. Why should a cellphone company allow people to listen to hours of music or watch hours of video FOR FREE. Why should a cellphone company allow ANY feature to be used for free on a cellphone.
Instead, the future of cellphone multimedia lies squarely in subscription services. You can stream music from the cellphone network, FOR A PRICE. Stream pictures taken to an online storage facility, FOR A PRICE. Stream video and data services FOR A PRICE. Even for those people that want to buy a song online with a cellphone, buying the music only puts the song into some online storage container that is streamed to your cellphone, for a price of course.
I can't see cellphone companies embracing technology that effectively ruins their subscription based market. Allowing users to store gigabytes of pictures, music, video, or text might get people to buy the cell phone, but cellular service providers won't want to carry a phone that doesn't force the end user to buy into some subscription or pay-per-use service.
Unlike digital multimedia players, cell phones are tied to a network. Given sufficient bandwidth, constant "always-on" music and video and data streaming should be possible, if for a price. I think cell companies are going to want to implement these subscription based features rather then slapping 8gb of hard drive into a cellphone so the end user doesn't spend a dime on ring tones, games, music, video, and other subscription services because they can find content on bit torrent or eDonkey.
In the end, perhaps only PDA based cellphones will get the boost in storage, but I can't see the average cell phone coming with gigabytes of storage, it just doesn't make sense.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
The utility of having this much space on your phone isn't just storing MP3s, videos, and whatnot. The real potential is in what this means you can create.
I'd like to have my phone be a constant or voice activated recorder. I have my phone on me at all times, it has a microphone, why not have it provide me a 'cockpit voice recorder' of sorts for life? No more guessing exactly what my wife told me to do, or having to write down phone numbers.
Generation 1, your phone just records MP3s of life as it happens to you. If anything interesting happens during the day, you save the file on your computer.
Generation 2, it meta overlays GPS data and is automatically stored as part of your 'diary'. You store it in an encrypted location so it can't be used against you unless you choose to release it, and you have a perfect alibi showing what you said and where you were.
Generation 3, combine voice processing to index everything spoken around you into a searchable form, recognize phone numbers, voices, etc, and create a full digital assistant. At some point around here, it can also store a digital video feed from any cameras you or your personal equipment might have that's synchronized with everything.
Generation 4, it hunts down Sarah Conner.
Everytime someone puts a bunch of storage into something, someone else says "what's the use?" And human nature being what it is, some other asshole decides to invent something cool to use that storage/capabillity for just so they can give the finger to the first person.
Look at the shadows & bright spots on the "memory chip" and the cell phone. They don't line up.
If this thing is real, why'd they have to photoshop an image of it?
However, just look at the flimsy ribbon connecting it, imagine the poor quality adhesive that will rip the bugger off when my phone is in the same pocket as my keys. Nah, I'll wait until they get it out of prototype phase.
They aren't seen by my phone. So clearly, your claims of technical ignorance and that "any" phone can play "any" MP3 are far overblown.
Are they VBR MP3s? If so can your phone handle those?
Are they using extended filename syour phone can't reconize?
Do you have your primary memory device even set to your TF card?
There's a plethora of reasons these may not show up, none of which have to do with DRM. If you're talking about the a950, I can assure you it can play MP3s fine. You're doing something incorrect.
Don't know about Samsung phones, but Motorola phones have transfer cables that are easy to come by... $10 or so on froogle. http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=samsung+transf er+cable&btnG=Search+Froogle (16.99 for the first result ... I don't know what model you have ) thats how I moved stuff onto my v265. I'm a Verizon customer too. Good cell phone forums for this kind of thing are www.howardsforum.com (may be misspelt, google it, I don't look up this kind of thing at work).
A memory card in a memory slot!
Next PSP generation will be able to make phone calls, I'm sure!
Yes, and the PSP phone will have:
1. a cost that's twice as much as the other cell phones
2. Downloadable games, at $29.95 each.
3. A proprietary memory card slot that won't have readers/writers available for it
4. A compilcated sync system where you have to give funny names to upload video files, ringtones
5. firmware upgrades every 2 months to prevent homebrewing
6. Dial a wrong number? You just bricked your psp-phone.
It seems that this might be the same case. First, the connection seems a bit fragile. Second, the current specificatins for some motoralo phone already include a memeory slot, but the maximum memory is listed at 256MB even though the current maximum memory module is 512K. This indicates that phones may have a less than GB limit, perhpas they do not include 32 bit addressing.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black