TELECOMS
“ BY PUSHING THE COMPUTING POWER TO THE CLOUD , SMARTPHONES CAN GROW SMALLER AND CONSUME LESS POWER ”
RAJ SHAH NORTH AMERICA INDUSTRY LEAD FOR TELECOM , MEDIA , AND TECHNOLOGY , PUBLICIS SAPIENT
Damian Hanson , Co-Founder & Director of CircleLoop , says : “ Cloud-based smartphones could offer consumers an unmatched user experience and may one day replace the physical smartphone altogether as usage grows .
“ Current issues with sustainability surrounding telecoms , such as manufacturing CO2 emissions and the use of non-recyclable materials , will also be solved thanks to a higher reliance on cloudbased smartphones . Supply chain issues will also be less problematic as demand for physical smartphone devices drops in favour of a simple login to a cloud-based telephone provider .”
The Long Road to Cloud Based Smartphones The idea of a smartphone that offloads the bulk of its processing and storage capabilities to the cloud ‒ pulling what the user needs as and when they need it ‒ has been slowly gaining traction for a number of years now .
Back in 2013 , two ex-Googlers , Tom Moss and Mike Chan , founded a company called Nextbit . The startup launched its debut smartphone , the Robin , on Kickstarter a few years later , with a vision to deliver “ seamless cloud-first computing across multiple devices ”.
The Robin came equipped with a paltry 32GB of onboard storage and a plan to use AI-based behavioural analysis to offload underused applications and data ‒ like videos , pictures , and even entire applications ‒ into an unlimited cloud storage space , outsourced in a way that optimised performance and reduced the demands placed on the device ’ s internal hardware . The approach is similar to Google ’ s Chromebooks , which host applications in Google ’ s own cloud and online to reduce the need for large amounts of RAM and powerful chipsets . The project raised over US $ 1mn on Kickstarter and , like most Google spin-off projects ahead of their time , fell quickly off the face of the Earth .
70 May 2022