iOS4 Blog: The iPhone 5 News Blog News Feed

Sunday, May 8, 2011

The iPhone 5 News Blog News Feed

iPhone 5 Sunday Coffee Break: Are You Cloudy On “The Cloud?”

Posted: 08 May 2011 12:06 AM PDT

Is the cloud coming to the iPhone 5? Join our discussion about it over coffee.

You’ve heard a lot about the iPhone 5 getting “cloud storage,” but is all this talk of clouds a bit foggy for you? Join the first in a new series of free-flowing Sunday discussions — dubbed the “iPhone 5 Sunday Coffee Break” — to share your thoughts and impressions on cloud computing, and what it will mean for the iPhone 5.

Among the many rumored iPhone 5 features out there, the one that confounds and confuses people the most is the rumor of “cloud memory” or “cloud storage.” Even if you’re not an IT professional, you’ve probably heard the term cloud computing bandied about, particularly when it comes to business solutions and internet technology. But for as much as multi-billion-dollar corporations are looking to tap into this elusive “cloud computing” technology, its benefits extend past the business world, offering some groundbreaking capabilities for the likes of mobile computing devices alla the iPhone 5.

So, what is cloud computing?

The simplest way to explain it is like this: “the cloud” is a term used to describe when a user (whether it is one person or an entire organization of users) have access to shared reasources on systems other than their own. In this way, instead of being limited by whatever your computer’s storage capabilities are, you instead have access to vast amounts of storage on mega-sized data centers, while still having instant access to the data and files.

A very Appl’ish example is the old iDisk and newer MobileMe, which allows you to store big files on Apple’s data center. I continue to use it to store large, uncompressed music audio files that are notoriously mammoth and suck up hard drive space quickly.

iPhone 5 and The Cloud

Obviously, cloud storage on a home computer is convenient for exponentially expanding storage capacity. But mobile devices can benefit even more from cloud storage, since it allows the device’s design to remain lithe and streamlined, negating the need for battery-sucking onboard storage components. In this way, a cloud-ready iPhone user could tote around major data with them without needing a fanny pack-mounted hard drive tethered to their iPhone.

The good news is that the iPhone 5 is most likely getting this cloud thing.

There are plenty of reports out there that corroborate this claim: Apple’s eco-busting (just kidding) purchase of a huge data center in North Carolina, garnering of the catchy “iCloud” domain name and mentioning of iCloud in recent developer preview code for Mac OS X Lion, and a dandy report from our friends 9to5Mac that Apple and Verizon have been chatting about doing future iOS updates (ostensibly for the iPhone 5) over the air (OTA) — meaning that users will no longer have to plug into a computer to do their updates.

In this way, the cloud approach to storage and computing begins to fulfill Steve Jobs’ dream of mobile devices like the iPhone 5 and iPad that could truly replace the personal computer; if they no longer need to interface with a computer for anything, they indeed become standalone mobile computing devices.

But if all this cloud computing banter is just too esoteric for you, there’s one very straightforward way to look at it from the perspective of the iPhone 5: look for the iPhone memory capacity to bump up from 16/32 GB to 128GB, or maybe even 256GB. That’s a lotta iTunes!

You probably know more about the cloud than I do. Or, maybe you don’t. But it’s Sunday, so sit down with your cup of coffee and join the morning’s discussion about the cloud and how it may impact the iPhone 5. Feel free to let us know your coffee brand, too. I’m drinking Equal Exchange Organic Breakfast Blend — it’s great!