Ever seen those little USB hard drives? Like the key chain size ones that store 10-50 MB's of data on flash memory chips that you can move around from PC to PC? What I am proposing is for some enterprising cell phone manufacture to put one of those inside a cell phone, it wouldn't make the cell phone any bigger than they all ready are. There would be a USB port on the side of the phone to connect your PC to it. A drive would appear inside of "my computer" then you could drag your files to the cell phone and take them on your merry way, say from the home to the office. Now, taking this idea one step further. If a buddy of yours has the same phone, or one based around the same technology, you could call him up and say, "hey man, you gotta hear this MP3, I'll beam it to you." You would use the menus on the phone to select the file from the hard drive and send it to the person on the other end of the line. To make this work someone would have to do some programming and mucking around in cell phone software, maybe it would require the creation of a whole new transfer protocol specifically for cellular networks, but I'm sure it's possible. And with digital service it's likely that the architecture all ready exists to support these kinds of services.-- ecolonsmak, Jun 13 2002 8th of 7's Link http://www.celestica.com//look under "Orange Videophone"// [[ sctld ], Jun 13 2002] Perhaps a better link http://www.telnic.org/gallery/Scroll down to the bottom, don't distracted by all the shining gadgets [[ sctld ], Jun 13 2002] This idea has possibilities, and most of the technology is already there. With some phones including MP3 players storing data in Flash ROM, as well as bluetooth and IR interfaces, it shouldn't be much of a step to do this.
Many standalone MP3 players allow you to use them for file storage/transfer; I don't know if phones with players let you do the same thing. Transmitting a file from one phone to another would be a logical extension (notwithstanding the copyright law implications, which we don't care about anyway).-- pottedstu, Jun 13 2002 Baked. Cooling on a tray, ready to serve.
We make this. A PDA with cellphone and USB and web browser and email and video camera. Retail, about USD$2500.-- 8th of 7, Jun 13 2002 who is we? provide a link to product page please.-- ecolonsmak, Jun 13 2002 www.celestica.com; look under "Orange Videophone"
I made this !-- 8th of 7, Jun 13 2002 I was kinda hoping for something that would work in America. HSCSD standards aren't supported by our cell networks at all.-- ecolonsmak, Jun 13 2002 "Always impatient you are, mmmm yes... "
OK, so you don't have HSCSD. Give us a few days, huh ? Next spin will have a tri band GSM RF with GPRS, and WCDMA soon when we get the chipsets out of the foundry.
Watch this space.-- 8th of 7, Jun 13 2002 random, halfbakery