One More Technology to Add to Gartner’s 8 Mobile Technologies to Watch
We commented on Gartner’s report about 8 Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2009 and 2010 a couple of days ago in this post. But we just realized that Gartner has missed perhaps the most important technology that will change how we use mobile devices: data storage in the cloud.
Today, consumers are still used to having their data and applications being stored locally on their devices. Each device represents a silo to its own, and moving data across devices such as between your phone and computer is a big pain in the rear.
That will all change as more users embrace “Truth in the Cloud”. Already, there are services like MobileMe, which let’s you access your data in the cloud and automatically syncs back your local copy into the cloud when things change, and it also syncs across all your other devices. Another example of cloud services that enable storing your data in the cloud is Live Mesh.
The T-Mobile G1 already asks you to sign in with your Google account on first use, and it automatically pulls down all your Google contacts, sets up your Google account, and brings your data on Google services onto your device. The Palm Pre will ditch the idea of of sync’ing, pushing, and saving completely. Whenever users make a change, Palm Pre’s WebOS will automatically take care of committing those changes to whatever data source it is accessing in the cloud.
Your days of manually typing in your contact list on your new phone will soon be over.