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.

HTC got it

Kudos to HTC.

In Barcelona they announced that with each of their new Android smartphones - of the HTC One series - customers get 25GB of storage on DropBox.

They did not go for an HTC Cloud Storage, but decided to cooperate with DropBox. Good. Because DropBox has apps, users, APIs, ...

I wonder how the HTC internal IT guys fought this decision ("we can do this ourselves").

Good for you, HTC.

Summer of storage

Seems to be the week of network storage: both Google and Microsoft launched storage related services; with Google it is just the option to buy (!) extended storage for Gmail and Picasa. Microsoft's Live SkyDrive is a „regular“ network storage offering, like XDrive and others already offer – just smaller.

Sounded more promising when I read the headlines ... ;-)

Slashdot:Does ZFS Obsolete Expensive NAS/SANs?

Slashdot | Does ZFS Obsolete Expensive NAS/SANs?: "Does ZFS Obsolete Expensive NAS/SANs?"

Finally, someone getting the value of Sun's ZFS - built into Solaris and OpenSolaris (and some rumors say it will be ported to the Mac).
The most impressive demo of ZFS can be found here (sorry, german only).