Sunday, May 27, 2012

Why handset manufacturers love cloud storage



In the last couple of weeks, every new Smartphone seems to come with cloud storage attached, e.g. the 25GB you get with HTC - as announced in Barcelona earlier this year.
I think there are good reasons for the manufacturers to prefer cloud storage over SD slots/cards:

  • A SD increases the cost of the device - not by a lot, but still.

  • It imposes physical restrictions on the design, because the SD slot it obviously has to be accessible.

  • Preferable not hidden behind the battery, otherwise you will get bad reviews

  • The capacity of the SD card will for some weird reasons affect reviews, too. If you only include 8GB of SD storage, reviewers will tell their readers to get some other smartphone with 16GB... If you include a too large SD card it will drive up cost and price...

  • Also, if a customer decides to replace his SD card with a larger one, the phone manufacturer will not see any revenue from it, but SanDisk and others will.



However, going for cloud storage

  • will have no impact on the manufacturing cost

  • will not impose any design restrictions

  • and you can upsell your users to higher capacity and make mony from it.



So, no wonder they love cloud storage.

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