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Mass Storage For Phones
The Demo conference started today, and the first news out of it comes from Seagate, which will be introducing pocket-sized, 20-GB, Bluetooth-equipped drives for cellphones this summer. They call this tech "DAVE" (one wonders whether the acronym or the expansion came first). Quoting: "DAVE-based products will be about the size of a credit card and less than half and inch thick, with an operating range of up to 30 feet from the connected phone... Software to hook the drives up to cellphones has already been produced for J2ME, BREW, Windows Mobile, Symbian and XCCC. Palm compatibility is forthcoming. The platform is open source..."
If your going to make a mobile, just make one. I just want my phone to have calling capability, address book, and maybe a browser. If it's going to be a miniature PC, just call it that.
The government can't save you.
What about battery life on both the phone and the drive? I know bluetooth has gotten alot better but what about when downloading the kind of video that is on euro and asian sets and on its way here. The concept seems really cool but the locking of American phones is sure to make its usefullness less.
Now, I haven't red TFA, but I'm hoping it has some sort of security/encryption support. What's the chance of someone in a 30ft radius peeking at the 10Gbs of data I'm carrying in my pocket, just using another cellphone?...
TFA is verrry light on technical details, but even bluetooth 2.0 is something like 3Mb/s. So transfering 10GB would take what, like 2 hours?
What I'm saying is it's fine for streaming LUG Radio, but not great for backing up your pr0n to something you can leave hidden under the mattress.
With iPhone sales potentially eating into the high-end iPod market, I think it's probably safe to assume that future HD based iPods will come with Bluetooth. Not for synchronizing, but to be remote storage devices for things like the iPhone.
It's a clever way for Apple to keep selling the big iPods, and opens up other possibilities. Last year I speculated here about cell phones serving as 'cockpit voice recorders' for life, the main obstacle being storage and battery life. With something like this, one down, one to go.
Can you imagine transferring 20GB over Bluetooth? The battery would die at about the 50MB mark...
In the Mac community, will Thursby Software have anything to say? Their product DAVE, note that the name is also presented in uppercase, has been in the Mac arena for more than a decade.
if you can't imagine using 20 gigs with a mobile device, then you simply lack imagination.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
So we have a device with a practically global broadband internet connection and we need a 20 gig HD to lop on the side for our contacts and music? I can't wait for the day when all the disk space the average consumer needs (see: non tin-foil hat wearer) can be located on a server farm in Kansas. Eventually all a computer/cellphone needs will be enough memory to load an OS and connect to the internet.
Maybe in a crappy phone, but think about this logically for a second.
The phone has 2 transmitters in it, a cellular one, that puts out a few watts of power, and bluetooth one, that puts out a small fraction of a watt. Sure, some phones might have horrible energy draining bluetooth implementations, but that doesn't mean that bluetooth is essentially a power hog, just that some of the implementations out there are less then ideal.