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..."

Comments

Interesting Question

[Anonymous Coward]

How long will it be until, for some users, the home pc is phased out? Take your mass storage cell-phone, drop it in a dock, and have word processing, email, and web access displayed on a LCD? Have the same setup at your work, your school, or your home.

Re:Interesting Question

[LaughingCoder]

The home PC will be replaced by the XBox or equivalent. Some small portable device will replace the various portable electronic devices like cell phones, home phones, mp3 players, PDAs, watches, portable media/video players, radios, portable TVs, remote controls. And with Zune and XBox, Microsoft has a contender in both markets. Wouldn't that be wierd if in the end Microsoft became a hardware company.

Re:Interesting Question

[SleepyHappyDoc]

Who needs a dock? This device is a 20GB drive that can sit in the bottom of your bag and connect wirelessly to your phone. How much of a stretch is a drive with Bluetooth or whatever (wireless USB?) that sits in the bottom of your bag, syncs to your phone or iPod when you're out, syncs to your PC when you get home or to work (from the bottom of your bag), syncs to your girlfriend's PC when you're at her place, etc., and contains your entire setup, say, in some kind of self-contained cross-platform VM? Is such a device possible with the technology we have now?

Re:Interesting Question

[clonmult]

Aspects of that are already here, although not that widespread.

You can get bluetooth keyboards for Symbian phones, and with Quick Office, you're set to go with wordprocessor and spreadsheets, albeit relatively limited, but good enough for keying in small documents. The only real catch is that the S60 screens are generally not that large (at the moment).

Heck, I'm pretty sure one of the keyboards had a phone dock in it - unfold the keyboard, stick the phone in the dock at the top, and you've got quite a nice little toy.

why not put it in the phone?

[neax]

if they can make a 20gb drive that small, why not just build them into phones. I do really need mass storage in my cell (well actually my smartphone/PDA), but one thing that i do not need is another thing to have to carry around... I look forward to the day that the phone/PDA/camera/mp3 player/video camera are all rolled into one nice device.

Re:why not put it in the phone?

[CastrTroy]

But wouldn't it be cool if you only had 1 storage device, which could be used for all your devices, such as PDA, Phone, MP3/Media Player, Camera, Laptop, along with a few others i'm probably forgetting? I think this device could be really nice if many different types of devices started to support it.

Re:Seems cool but..

[ScrewMaster]

the locking of American phones is sure to make its usefullness less.

... is sure to make it useless. I just bought a Samsung phone from Sprint, and the Bluetooth headset works great but that's about all you can do with the thing. Oh, you can blow "business cards" back and forth, but only one at a time, and forget about up/downloading images from the camera. Unless, of course, you want to pay more juice to Sprint for their "PCS Vision" service, which I refuse to do because I don't think I should have to pay to send my own data two feet to my PC. It is a nice phone (the camera is just a gimmick to me at 640x480) and that's all I bought it for, but the attitude of these companies irritates me.

Gagh. Honestly, the overall sleaziness of U.S. carriers is enough to make you want to throw up.

Re:Isn't bluetooth sloooooow?

[earnest murderer]

Even if it were more capable, why would you want to carry around a 20 gig drive in your pocket? I already carry an 80 gig iPod in there the only thing it lacks is bluetooth, and only until Apple puts a drive in their iPhone... Which would pretty much eliminate the need for transmitting data to a phone for display.

Any way you cut it you've got two devices, phone and drive, or phone and iPod. And an iPod doesn't drain my phone's batteries.

Maybe someone could chime in with a use case that makes sense?

What really IS the size, anyway?

[Namarrgon]

"Credit-card sized" is an abused term these days. And the Seagate press release is self-contradictory:

The DAVE reference design is about the size of a centimeter-thick credit card, with dimensions of 3.5 x 4.7 x .47 inches (61 x 89 x 12 mm) and weighing only 2.5 ounces (70 grams)

So which is it? 3.5 x 4.7 inches (89 x 120mm), or 61 x 89mm (2.4 x 3.5 inches)? The latter sounds more credit-card sized to me.