ON SUPER-SIZED COMPUTING TO GO

FROM U2 to U3

With the advent of miniature hard drives and flash memory drives, made popular by iPods (regular and shuffle), and Apple's joint marketing efforts like the U2 iPod, consumers have obviously got a taste for the convenience of taking their music around.  In my humble opinion, the next major opportunity for these storage devices is for portable computing on the go.

Regular readers know my fascination with the coming trend for computing off a USB hard drive (see my posts on "computers on a stick" here and here). 

While it's currently possible to load up a number of commercial, shareware and freeware programs off a USB drive that are capable of running off these portable hard drives, we're likely to see a host of non-geeky USB products next year that makes this easy for mainstream users. 

The industry standards and coordination/cooperation that will likely make this possible are being fostered by a company called U3.  Set up as a private company backed by memory stalwarts like Sandisk and others, the company, according to their web-site, is focused on:

"...offering U3 smart software including productivity applications, internet, email , and browser functionality, chat and VOIP capabilities, content, entertainment, multi-media, photo, and design software, and security, enterprise, medical, and other kinds of programs.

By uniting the USB flash drive industry and software developers around a single development platform with best of breed technology, U3 brings the benefit of universal personal workspace portability to hardware manufacturers, applications developers, and end-users alike."

Whether it's through the efforts of companies like U3 and/or others, ubiquitous, computing to go is inevitable.

Much of the media and the industry is infatuated of late with the competition between Google and Microsoft, with no less than Bill Gates acknowledging that Google is "more like us than anyone else we have ever competed with" (via New York Times).

The underlying premise is that personal computing is likely to move off individual computers onto the web, an idea I've been excited about for some years now (see post here).  But it's not as simple as that. 

Consumers will also need to take some personal data with them a lot of the times, for reasons of security, privacy, and convenience.  This will also be important, for the times there is no connectivity to the Internet to be had, wired or wireless.  The same goes for corporate applications for their on the go employees, "mobile warriors" or not.

With the advent of miniature hard drives and flash memory drives, made popular by iPods (regular and shuffle), and current "everything and the kitchen sink" style cell phones, users will increasingly need to carry some of their favorite applications and data with them.

In fact, i wouldn't be surprised if we see cell phones in the near future with USB ports on them that could be plugged into personal computers and laptops, or even miniature USB drives that could be detached off the phone to plug into a computer.

Over time, we will see hard drives (USB or otherwise) being sold with bundled application software loaded on for user convenience.  We may even be able to "Super-size" the order with maximum storage and commercial/shareware/freeware applications ready to go.

While we're waiting for this new world of on the go computing, it is possible to get a taste of this today, using off-the-shelf USB drives.

In that context, PC Magazine has a great article on current applications that can be made to work off USB drives.

Being a gadget freak, I'm in the process of setting most of these up on my USB drive of choice.  There are many options of USB sizes, with the best values currently being in the 512 megabytes to 1GB drives.

I've chosen the currently "latest and greatest" 4 Gigabyte Rocket drive that offers the advantage of 30x24 Megabytes per second transfer speeds upstream and down respectively, compared to the typical 11x8 MB per second speeds on "conventional" USB drives. 

Although they retail for as much as $400, you can get them for under $270 at online sites like Newegg.

If you're game to try some of this stuff out, PC Magazine has a great article reviewing the array of software programs that work off USB drives.  The article starts to provide an inkling of things to come for miniature computing on the go...Recommended.

P.S.  I've recently introduced a new category called "My Gadgets" that lists posts where I talk about the various gadgets I'm currently trying out.

 

Comments

[Nick Fessel]

"Consumers will also need to take some personal data with them a lot of the times, for reasons of security, privacy, and convenience. This will also be important, for the times there is no connectivity to the Internet to be had, wired or wireless."

It's interesting to note that many are considering the Web as the computing platform of the future. Users won't need to store data on hardware- all data will reside on the Web. Of course, you make a valid point that a person may be in an area with no Web availability, so a backup such as a USB device is required- but this would only be a backup of data files, not the software. The applications will reside on the Web.

I'd rather have a website that I can log into, plug in a USB device with all of my files, and manipulate the files using the website. The files that don't need added security will remain stored on the website, and the files that require additional security will only reside on the USB drive. This separates content from the applications.

The application doesn't have to reside on the USB drive. In fact, housing all data on the USB drive, including the applications is equivalent to carrying around a hot-swappable hard drive- there is no added convenience (besides the small size of the USB drive). Whereas, storing the files and applications on the Web frees the user from having to carry around the applications. With the applications on the Web, there is less possibility they will become corrupt or accidentally deleted.

[Michael Parekh]

Good points...the USB or miniature hard drive in my scenario would have some processing AS WELL AS storage capabilities...this is in order for it to run mini-web server applications locally as needed.

This way, the user could continue to work on his/her applications/data offline (whether connectivity is available or not). Then when he/she plugs into the web and/or PC/laptop/cellphone/PDA etc. of choice,the content would be synced to the master version on the web.

All this would need to occur transparently for the user, since most mainstream users won't be too bothered with the details.

Remember, many users may WANT to be offline while they work, since many wireless data plans, especially on wireless company networks, have metered tariffs, either for internet access in general, for for specific applications (music transferred, use of the wireless device as a modem to a laptop, etc.)

We still have a few years to go before we have the utopian world of wired/wireless connectivity available anywhere, anytime, at free or near-free, flat rates.