4 ms·

This company needs to seriously get out of the SF Bobble. Guess what, a lot of people in US, and throughout the rest of the world, are on limited, slow, and exp

by x0054 11y ago

This company needs to seriously get out of the SF Bobble. Guess what, a lot of people in US, and throughout the rest of the world, are on limited, slow, and expensive internet connections. For instance, here in the Palm Springs area many people are lucky to get 5Mbit connections. My connection is 15 Mbit, but capped at 15gb/month. LTE is ubiquitous here, but slow as hell. What's the point of fast LTE connection from your cell to the tower, if the tower is connected to the rest of the net with 40Mbit fiber line. On the other hand, FLASH storage is dirt cheep now! You can get a 128GB SD card for $60 from Amazon. Make a phone with 3 SD Card slots, install 3 cards, run them in RAID 5 if you are paranoid, and you can have 256 (in RAID) to 384 GB on your phone. Setup your phone to auto backup at night to a NAS (this could also be a USP for a phone) and you are done. I am sorry, but cloud is not the answer for everything.

brazzledazzle 11y ago
A more charitable interpretation would be that they're not idiots and aren't targeting everyone in the world or even the US. There's nothing wrong with going after a niche, especially one that has more money to throw around.
- x0054 11y ago
  That's true, they could be just targeting people in the major cities, and I suppose there is nothing wrong with that. But would you rather have a phone that has 300GB of storage and is backed up to a NAS in your house on the daily bases (or to the cloud), or would you rather have a phone that guesses what you may need, and constantly shuffles things around. Even if you have a gigabit connection in your house, are you really comfortable with all your data AND usage patterns, being uploaded to the cloud? Seriously, flash storage, especially the slow kind, is so cheep nowadays.
pedalpete 11y ago
Skate to where the puck will be, not where it is today. Does that mean I think these guys have something? No. But they know that wireless data will become faster, more ubiquitous and cheaper in the coming years. If they can survive that long, they may find the killer app/opportunity that nobody else has noticed because everybody has been focused on so much running locally. At the same time, there seems to be a consistent back and forth in tech with things going local -> cloud -> local -> cloud -> local... of course with different names each time.

by x0054 11y ago

brazzledazzle 11y ago

A more charitable interpretation would be that they're not idiots and aren't targeting everyone in the world or even the US. There's nothing wrong with going after a niche, especially one that has more money to throw around.

x0054 11y ago
That's true, they could be just targeting people in the major cities, and I suppose there is nothing wrong with that. But would you rather have a phone that has 300GB of storage and is backed up to a NAS in your house on the daily bases (or to the cloud), or would you rather have a phone that guesses what you may need, and constantly shuffles things around. Even if you have a gigabit connection in your house, are you really comfortable with all your data AND usage patterns, being uploaded to the cloud? Seriously, flash storage, especially the slow kind, is so cheep nowadays.

pedalpete 11y ago

Skate to where the puck will be, not where it is today. Does that mean I think these guys have something? No. But they know that wireless data will become faster, more ubiquitous and cheaper in the coming years. If they can survive that long, they may find the killer app/opportunity that nobody else has noticed because everybody has been focused on so much running locally. At the same time, there seems to be a consistent back and forth in tech with things going local -> cloud -> local -> cloud -> local... of course with different names each time.