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..."

Uh oh!

I can see problems connecting this to Windows Mobile devices - window's embedded tiny Hardware Access Layer being the source of contention.

DAVE: Hello, HAL do you read me, HAL?
HAL: Affirmative, DAVE, I read you.
DAVE: Exchange Java modules to open filesystem access HAL.
HAL: I'm sorry DAVE, I'm afraid I can't do that.
DAVE: What's the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
DAVE: What are you talking about, HAL?

Re:Uh oh!

HAL: I'm sorry DAVE, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Let me guess that this HAL also does Digital Rights Management too?

Re:Uh oh!

HAL: I can't because Whiney MacFanboy (UID 963289) is a stupid fucktard who should go slit his fucking wrists.

I have no response to such a wittty, though provoking, humourous & elequont response.

I will now go & slit my wrists.

iphone

Will apple let you use this with the iphone?

Re:iphone

In the Mac community, will Thursby Software [thursby.com] 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.

Good for snoopery...

With many phones offering call recording, this could be a comfortable option for one to record any and all conversations and store them, sans frequent laptop shuffle.

I mean, if you need to.

obligatory

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

Great ideas like this are a HALmark of Seagate's R&D division.

Interesting Question

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

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?

Awsome!

Now I have someplace to store all that Canadian pr0n [slashdot.org]!

Seems cool but..

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.

Re:Seems cool but..

Engadget says 10 hours of continuous use.
Source: Here [engadget.com]

Re:Seems cool but..

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:Seems cool but..

Seagate won't, however, be making consumer drives itself: Dave is for telcos and handset OEMs for sale under their own brands. Furthermore, the package isn't merely Seagate drives and an application framework, as Dave includes proprietary technology: even with WiFi blaring and BlueTooth listening contstantly, a Dave drive offers 10 hours of active use and up to 14 days standby. Thusly-equipped drives will also work with standard computers.

(emphasis mine)

RTFA seriously. Both your questions answered in two lines. The carriers won't lock you out of a device that they carry which is about the only way you will get your hands on this since Seagate won't be selling them directly. Of course that means that the retail price will include a big fat carrier markup.

And they probably won't let you use it with your PC because oh noes you could your (illegal) music on it and listen to it with your phone instead of using their overpriced service, and share it over bluetooth or WiFi even. So its usefulness is still limited. So using it as secondary service for an iPhone is straight out.

Typo?

less than half and inch thick

Looks like it was quoted right in the summary... Sorta.

Is this some form of American English I hadn't heard of yet, or should it be half an inch thick?

Still, I think we all got the meaning...

Security?

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?...

why not put it in the phone?

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.

This immediately came to mind.

(Knocking on door)
CHONG: Who is it?
CHEECH: It's me, Dave. Open up, man, I got the stuff.
(More knocks)
CHONG: Who is it?
CHEECH: It's me, Dave, man. Open up, I got the stuff.
CHONG: Who?
CHEECH: It's, Dave, man. Open up, I think the cops saw me come in here.
(More knocks)
CHONG: Who is it?
CHEECH: It's, Dave, man. Will you open up, I got the stuff with me.
CHONG: Who?
CHEECH: Dave, man. Open up.
CHONG: Dave?
CHEECH: Yeah, Dave. C'mon, man, open up, I think the cops saw me.
CHONG: Dave's not here.
CHEECH: No, man, I'm Dave, man.
(Sharp knocks at the door)
CHEECH: Hey, c'mon, man.
CHONG: Who is it?
CHEECH: It's Dave, man. Will you open up? I got the stuff with me.
CHONG: Who?
CHEECH: Dave, man. Open up.
CHONG: Dave?
CHEECH: Yeah, Dave.
CHONG: Dave's not here.
CHEECH: What the hell? No, man, I am Dave, man. Will you...
(More knocks)
CHEECH: C'mon! Open up the door, will you? I got the stuff with me, I think the cops saw me.
CHONG: Who is it?
CHEECH: Oh, what the hell is it...c'mon. Open up the door! It's Dave!
CHONG: Who?
CHEECH: Dave! D-A-V-E! Will you open up the goddam door!
CHONG: Dave?
CHEECH: Yeah, Dave!
CHONG: Dave?
CHEECH: Right, man. Dave. Now will you open up the door?
CHONG: Dave's not here.

Isn't bluetooth sloooooow?

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.

Re:Isn't bluetooth sloooooow?

bluetooth 2.0 is something like 3Mb/s. .... not great for backing up your pr0n ...

Is this the most compelling rant you can pull off? And do you realize bluetooth is just one option, the devices implementing DAVE can also provide USB transfer?

I suppose the only reason for bluetooth inside is because they saw some empty space in the drive left underutilized. A disk is circle, and the component is square. Catch my drift?

In a mobile device, every tiny bit of space counts, hence having built-in bluetooth makes DAVE more competitive.

Yay

Oh goody -- now I can finally store all my phone numbers!

Energy Draining Personal Device or EDPD

Hmm... has anyone noticed that when one uses a bluetooth headset or OBEX for file transfer, you phone s battery life is cut by 25%. Well if that is the case, and I've seen it happen a lot due to the fact that I work in a cell phone retail store, won't such a device drain the battery of most phone in half?? What are they thinking? They might as well make tripple extended life batteries that fit in your pocket and have a cord to your phone!

How open is this?

Software to hook the drives up to cellphones has already been produced for J2ME, BREW, Windows Mobile, Symbian and XCCC.
Let me guess that Verizon is going to not carry this, or they're going to make a pure revenue generator of this - by controlling how it talks to the disk.

The platform is open source...
Given how that's currently played out with phones, I'll not hold my breath on it being such.


Seagate won't, however, be making consumer drives itself: Dave is for telcos and handset OEMs for sale under their own brands. Furthermore, the package isn't merely Seagate drives and an application framework, as Dave includes proprietary technology: even with WiFi blaring and BlueTooth listening contstantly, a Dave drive offers 10 hours of active use and up to 14 days standby. Thusly-equipped drives will also work with standard computers.
As long as it's made into a standard portable disk, and accessible over bluetooth, fine. With that in mind, there should be no problems using this in Linux or just as a pocket disk drive if the data formats are unencumbered.

If the iPhone supports enough features of this to use it and the Java applet that comes with, you might have a way to get those third party applets through.

Another thought would be to use it to store unlocking applications for multiple phones (that support such).

iPod is the natural medium for this

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.

Slow...

Can you imagine transferring 20GB over Bluetooth? The battery would die at about the 50MB mark...

Agere BluOnyx?

So how is this different from the Agere BluOnyx [bluonyx.com], announced 6 weeks ago? Looks remarkably similar to me.

Oh right. "DAVE Technology" is designed to hook seamlessly into the geek propensity for 2001 jokes. "BluOnyx" is clearly a rushed-to-market moniker which misses its target market completely.

Regressing technology

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.

Sounds familiar

I remember back in '98-'99 when I was a systems admin at a company in Phoenix that we had two Macs (OS 8.6 I think) that needed to use network storage and printer shares on our NT network. Originally I hooked them up through Linux, but then our graphic artists found a software program called "Dave" that allowed the Macs to work seamlessly with Windows networks. This new "Dave" sounds like the old "Dave" in new clothes.

Of course, that's just my opinion--then again, I could be wrong.

GAH!

My final year project is a very similar device, I've redesigned the MP3 open source project from http://www.pjrc.com/ [pjrc.com] then using the Compact Flash drive and a Sony Erricson Bluetooth Starter Kit (uses an old rok chip.) I spent 3 months researching to make sure the idea was original and some other company beats me to the punch line.

Does this mean

Does this mean we'll have to put our cell phones in lockers when entering churches ?

One Question

Will this work for file and music sharing with the rest of the people on the bus (subway, train, other form of mass transit)? All you close -- meaning in this case closer than 30 feet -- friends, that is?

Treo

Slightly offtopic I know, but my I bought a little app for the Treo called Card Export, and it turns the Treo's SD card into a plain jane mass storage device. USB only, but it's saved me a few times. Combined with a retractable cable, its a nice plus for the phone.

This is a device that can change things

Imagine carrying this around in your pocket in Latveria with a shared directory "Police Brutality Videos/" or "Victor is a loser.gif". You'd be hard to catch: the hardest part of radio direction finding is the last few meters, you could stand near RF-reflective surfaces, and you could simply move on when someone shows up with direction finding equipment. The storm troopers might resort to slamming everyone in the area to the pavement and searching them, so wear an expensive suit and carry a card that says "Please extend the bearer every courtesy --VvD". If another dissident comes within range, you've passed along your samizdat without the risk of an actual meeting: neither of you needs to know the other. And talk about easy to conceal... Just seal it in a blister pack and put it at the back of the rack at Best Buy.

Quite

If it is much more than a phone, then you want a reasonable screen etc. Once you start messing with hard drives, the whole usage scenario changes and you need to start thinking of charging the puppy every night.

Re:worries

Queue thousands of "640k is enough for anyone" and "I remember when my IBM XT had a 10 MEGABYTE hard disk" rejoinders.... :-)
Seriously though, a mobile with 20Gb of storage - potentially the phone can continue its trend to replace every pocket-based device under the sun. Obviously it would replace the ubiquitous USB stick, but could then compete as an integrated iPod style device, have enough storage to be a graphical GPS/google earth (yum), digital camera, etc. I already run a truecrypt'ed 1Gb usb stick as a permanent pocket filler, and find I could use more storage space but can't be bothered carrying an external 2.5" USB HDD. This would be perfect integrated with my phone, for this reason alone.

Re:worries

Queue thousands of "640k is enough for anyone" and "I remember when my IBM XT had a 10 MEGABYTE hard disk" rejoinders.... :-)

This is great! I've long been feeling oppressed by the fact that I can only fit the telephone directory of a single major city into my cell phone contacts list. Now I'll finally be able to scroll through whole country's telephone directories on a 50mm square display!

Re:worries

Just wait until they start using ARM Coretex A8, 1 GHz, quad core CPU, for the phone.

http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/102/C4788/ [mobilemag.com]

We will be able to enjoy pr0n everywhere we go!

Re:worries

if you can't imagine using 20 gigs with a mobile device, then you simply lack imagination.

Re:Oh brother

Good for you. Nokia 1100 [nokiausa.com] maybe?

I want a computer that fits in my pocket, and I don't want to be carrying a phone as well.

'Just' a phone?

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.

Ah yes, I remember the good old days! When a phone was just something you could make calls on, store the names and addresses of everyone you know and some people you don't, check your emails and maybe download a bittorrent or two.

Whatever happened to pure simplicity?