Do you really need 16GB on your handset?

Another question, this time prompted by a story I read recently on CNET Australia.

The author of the story reckons that 16GB is far too much. ‘How,’ asks the author, ‘Are you supposed to fill up that space?’

‘I’m sceptical,’ the author continues, ‘That many people need a 16GB mini-SD card for their phone.’

Or a phone that has 16GB on board — such as the top level iPhone and an increasing array of new handsets.

What would you do with 16GB?

Well, near-DVD quality video takes up a good amount of space.

I’ve got 36GB of music and about 10GB of TV shows. Each movie I’ve downloaded from iTunes is at least 1GB.

Do I want to put 16 movies on my handset?

Probably not. Not unless I’m doing the 10 hour San Francisco-Heathrow run every week.

If your average 8 megapixel camera produces photos at, what, 2-3mb each — 16GB gives you a heck of a lot of space.

What to do?

I’m all about the cloud, myself.

I don’t hold for carrying round my data. That’s very 1991.

I want to have it all in the cloud. The moment I originate any media, I want it zapped from my device and into the cloud, tagged as appropriate.

I don’t really want it stored on my device. I’d like to be able to flick through some galleries if you and I were sat next to each other. But I’d rather the photos were streamed straight to my device as I flicked.

You can do this right now. Google’s Picasa has a brilliant iPhone version that lets you, provided you’re on WiFi — flick through your gallery as though the images were stored locally. Smart.

You can stream your music this way too. Provided it’s not iTunes DRM’ed, using MP3tunes and other such services.

Mobile networks in the West aren’t advanced enough to support this yet. If you’d like an illustration of how shit they are, take four phones on any network and try making video calls on each, whilst you’re in one area, connected to one cell mast. The signal quality is rubbish. The throughput shit.

I think I need at least 1-2mb throughput — i.e. 1-point-something meg PER SECOND to my device. At that point I’ll relax.

If I’ve got 16GB on my handset, I’ll fill it up. I’ll stick some music on it.

For others, the data capacity of their devices is hugely, hugely important. One of my friends, Tom, is a die-hard Apple fanboy. I had a good time winding him up for buying a £99 Apple iSight webcam — and then having to wait weeks for it to arrive — when he could have gone out to PC World and picked up a decent alternative for £20.

Then I too went out and bought an iSight.

Anyway. My point is that Tom has about 30gb of music. He won’t buy an iPhone until he can put ALL his music on to it — and thus render his iPod irrelevant.

Half of me thinks this is a sensible approach.

Half of me thinks Tom should get on with it and start enjoying iPhone.

How important is device attached storage to you?

Once you’ve got handsets with, say, 50gb capacities — is that going to get ridiculous? Do we actually NEED that sort of live device storage? Or can’t we begin to use the cloud?