Archive for June, 2012

It looks like it’s not only Google that think the future’s in the Cloud; Baidu have recently unveiled their latest Cloud phone. As a Baidu handset, it’ll also include voice search, voice control, and other online services offered by the Chinese search company. Of course, its biggest feature is going to be cloud storage. It’ll feature 100GB of cloud storage, which means you can store a pretty huge amount of games, videos, photos and messages in the cloud.

If you don’t know what cloud storage is, think of Google Documents. (If you haven’t got Google Documents, then, do.) Google Docs is an online application which allows users to write text documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and then save them ‘online’. This means your document doesn’t take up any room on your hard drive, and it is, in fact, not even stored on your computer. You can access your Google documents on any computer in the world, as long as you remember your password and have an internet connection. Pretty neat, huh?

Cloud storage on phones is an even bigger deal; we all have a personal computer or laptop, which, let’s face it, is where we’re going to want to do all of our work, writing, editing, etc. With phones, however, there are plenty of reasons why you might want to access your files from a different device, without having to physically move it over first. Want to edit the photos you took yesterday or write up those essay ideas you typed on the bus? Just turn on your PC and access your documents from the Cloud.

Saving your stuff in the cloud is also even more secure than saving it on your gadget or gizmo, whatever that might be. You might think that since it’s just floating around the internet it’s potentially insecure, but provided you keep your passwords secret and obscure, there’s nothing that should make your cloud accounts any more difficult to get into than your bank account.

Cloud storage is also cheaper than physical storage. The Baidu handset comes with 100GB of cloud storage, though there have also been rumours of a 300GB version being made available. In any case, you wouldn’t find 100GB of physical storage on a smartphone these days, would you? That’s because in physical terms, it’s a huge amount to include on a tiny little phone, but in cloud terms it’s minuscule.

If you’re still not convinced, just wait until you get your hands on one of the latest HTC One range of handsets. Each HTC One phone comes with 25GB of Dropbox storage – which, by the way, is cloud storage – and as one of the first range of smartphones to utilise the cloud, it should be sure to recruit a few converts along the way.