Guy Kewney

I’ve been playing with a few clouds. On balance, though, I prefer being more down to earth and would rather use my laptop. Being a freelance writer, there’s a limit to how much ‘cloud computing’ (the latest buzzword to describe web-based computing) I can do.

Most of the excitement these days is about cloud systems that give corporate IT departments extra resources. It’s outsourcing with bells on – find a company that runs the remote system, and you pay to use it. But we can all have a go – and I found some interesting toys.

The obvious drawbacks of cloud computing are that you’re stuffed if you can’t access the internet. And it’s all too easy to drop off the web; even in a major metropolis like London, all you have to do is travel the London Underground, and ping - your connection has vanished.

This made me probably a rotten person to play with the Pocketsurfer, a small, Psion-sized information appliance that gives you a very low-cost way of reaching any website. All you need is a GPRS link and the purchase price of the device (around £150), which includes a normal amount of web time per month. It needs some tweaks before I’d regard it as having reached version 1.0, but even so it’s easy to see why people like it. Unlike even the best mobile phones, it has a proper web-shaped display and it is possible to view ordinary PC-style web pages. But again, if you travel on the London Underground, it will become just a weight in your pocket.

I also played with the Mobiu. It’s a USB memory stick, with pretty nearly no memory on board. What it does do is give you pretty well iron-clad secure access from any PC on the web, 5GB of internet storage for your important data, as well as the online applications to run them. Its strength is the standard mobile phone Sim card, plus a Pin, which makes it really hard for someone to get access to your data.

I’ve also looked at Portable Apps, which takes a standard application, produces a version that sits on a big USB disk (Flash memory is fine) and in cludes all the required system furniture, such as .ini files. In my opinion, this is the way to go.

But when people talk about accessing the cloud with a dumb terminal, what do they mean by ‘dumb’? What they actually mean is accessing the cloud with a relatively low-powered PC or information appliance, but one that has several hundred times the speed, data storage capacity, display response and even usability of the standard desktop machine of 15 years ago. And, to remind you of the figures, in 1993 I had a 66MHz PC running Windows for Workgroups, with around 20MB of storage and around 2MB of onboard Ram.

That wouldn’t be enough for a standard mobile phone today. Compared to an iPod Touch, it was not a computer. Nonetheless, it was able to do all my data processing at the time. And its big advantage over a cloud terminal is that if the mains went dead, you didn’t have to throw away all the food in the freezer, because it carried on working nonetheless.

Avant Go started the idea of giving Palm users newspapers to go: you downloaded journals of your choice onto your handheld and you could update them for breaking news as the day went on. The rule of thumb was you had all the data you needed during the day, you could take it with you and no more than five per cent of it would have become out of date before you looked at it.

Using the internet cloud for occasional updates is fine. But downloading data is not free. It may seem so, because most of us aren’t spending all day downloading. However, ask any ISP how it plans to cope with the current boom in multimedia streaming – with services such as BBC iPlayer and Bittorrent sharing - and it will admit it will have to increase prices. Mobile broadband is also a temporary bubble - four years from now, you won’t be able to afford it, certainly not at the rate needed to support current IT work over the air.

When companies such as Mobiu or Windows Live Mesh offer 100GB and unlimited data traffic, these will be (roughly) level with a small laptop in capacity. But they won’t do that, as they want to make a profit. It’s a nice idea, but mainstream? I don’t think so.

This article appeared in the September 2008 issue of PCW

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!