Phone in the Cloud?

I have just read an interesting blog, where somebody questioned the need to have 16Gb of storage on a phone. Their argument was what would they do with all that storage and with cloud computing, would you actually need it.

Cloud computing is all well and good if you have a fast (way above 3G or HSDPA) and reliable connection. This just doesn't happen at the moment, either here in New Zealand or from what I have read, the rest of the world.

I am a big believer in cloud computing and think it will be great for education as we get the technology to work for us (and the children) and not the other way round, which I believe it has been since the introduction of the PC. Just how much time do we spend upgrading, updating, securing etc and how much do we actually use it for some use. Having it in a cloud takes away the control and responsibility from the IT department and gives it back to the end user, who doesn't have to worry about the technicalities. They just need a fast connection and a browser, how simple is that.

A phone is a different piece of kit. The fact that it is mobile and is with you everywhere, actually cries out that you need local storage, just in case the network is not available. Memory is cheap and getting cheaper and why would I want to stream music and movies to my phone, when I can only do it in the major cities. We can take this cloud computing a little too far and be caught in the big wave of optimism over it. Use it for what you need use it for, but don't think that everything will be in the cloud, well not just yet!

Personally I have around 30Gb of music alone so I can't wait until they bring out a 64Gb phone so I can store all my music and some movies as well. 

Until the networks get faster we will always need some storage, particularly on mobile devices. 

Cloud Computing and Mobiles

It's been a while since I last blogged, but here is a subject that I have a real passion about and that's the sort of thing you need to get yourself back into it. I subscribe to the Opera Mini blog (no surprise there) and they informed me that they had added a neat feature, whereby you can zoom into any image before you download it. This was available on Opera mini 3.x and is really useful when you only have a small screen like a phone. Anyway the clever part is that they did all of the updating on their servers and like magic that functionality was suddenly available, for what could be up to 100 million people (this is Operas estimates of Opera mini users). This is the real power of cloud computing, where the 'real' power is in the server farms that they operate, just like Google does. You no longer need power hungry processors and huge amounts of memory and operating systems on the device. It just becomes a connection to the 'cloud'. I also received an interesting feed looking at how a simple browser on the phone can replace all the in built applications found on any modern smart phone, like mine. I already use my browser a lot rather than the inbuilt applications, because it is faster and I won't always have a smart phone as I believe that cloud computing is the future and I will have a phone with an advanced browser connecting me to the clouds. Hopefully people will think that my head isn't in them!