When I’m asked to give a talk about technology I like to pull out my iPod Touch, wave it at the crowd and point out that ‘in the future’ it will be a supercomputer with parallel processors and terabytes of storage.

Well, it seems the future has arrived rather earlier than I imagined, as a new service called ‘Oosah’ has just started offering a terabyte of storage for the iPhone/Touch ‘in the palm of your hand’.

On closer investigation it seems that they aren’t ripping the case apart to install some cool new quantum-effect anti-matter memory that has just emerged from the labs, which is a shame.

Instead they have a website that gives your phone access to remote data when you’re on the move and lets you copy files back and forward.  As long as you’ve got a signal or a wireless connection you’ll be able to play music, watch photos and read documents as if they were local.

It may be useful, but it isn’t of course a new idea, as corporate power users have been connecting to the office network from their mobile devices for many years, and even mere mortals have had access to gigabytes of disk space courtesy of their webmail services.

I often email large documents to my gmail account just so I can read them on the move, and before the iPod made it easy to store files directly in its memory it was the simplest way to ensure that I had a copy of a presentation or paper with me.

It isn’t even a new idea for the iPhone, as online storage providers like box.net have let users access their files using a web-based application for over a year now, although having a whole terabyte is certainly exciting for my inner geek.

But it will appeal to iPhone users as part of the growing trend towards using the iPhone/Touch as a general-purpose computer, something that has become a lot easier since Apple released the upgraded operating system.

Lots of interesting applications are out there already.

I can post directly to my weblog using the Wordpress application, which even lets me write posts while offline and publish them when I get a connection.

I’ve installed FileMagnet, which lets me drag and drop documents from my desktop computer onto the Touch so that I can read them while I’m offline. It’s incredibly useful for technical reports which I would never want to print, but also works surprisingly well for ebooks too.

And a new iPhone application, DataCase, turns your iPhone into a wireless network drive that you can see from any of your computers. You can even allow other people to access your phone, so if you want someone to have a copy of a presentation you’ve written they can simply take it over a wireless link.

As with box.net, this is nothing new for other phone users. I was transferring files to my Sony P800 five years without thinking it was remarkable and Nokia phones can even act as independent wifi hotspots thanks to JoikuSpot.

But the screen size and quality, multi-touch capability and usability of the iPhone interface, combined with the increased processing power that today’s small devices offer, means that the experience is far more satisfying for users, and this is where the iPhone is clearly a game-changer.

It is not about numbers. iPhone sales date are hardly significant compared to the size of the handset market worldwide, and even the total number of smartphones in use is comparable to the basic Nokia 1100, which has sold over two hundred million and continues to be important in non-Western markets.

Apple has shown what is possible in a phone, and now ther handset and PDA manufacturers are starting to  offer new interfaces and new services in order to compete in a way that is beginning to change the way we think about handsets.

A phone used to be just a phone. As they became more powerful and got better screens they started to turn into PDAs, personal data assistants, but their network capabilities were limited to voice and SMS until smartphones began offering access to the ‘mobile Internet.’

Today’s devices they are more like nodes on a network, accessing a range of services, some local and some remote, and it seems that they have joined the  trend towards utility computing, where processing and storage happen wherever it is cheapest or most convenient, instead of being tied to specific computers.

This is  often called ‘cloud computing’, because everything happens in a vaguely understood cloud of online servers.  Today’s handsets are now capable of using the cloud just as well as laptops and desktop computers, and they may even find more ways to use its untapped potential.

New phone operating systems like Google’s Android, or new versions of old phone software like Windows Mobile or Symbian OS, which recently announced that it would become open source to encourage developers to work with it, will allow developers to exploit powerful handsets and bring us closer to a world where we can tap into as much storage and as much processing as we want, whenever and wherever we want it.

As I sit and play with my iPod Touch I can start to imagine what that world will be like, because of all the technology companies out there Apple seems best at helping us to dream rather good dreams.

Bill’s Links

Extending iPhone storage:
Box.net:
Nokia 1100:
Mobiles in Africa:
JoikuSpot:

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• Techdirt: A Detailed Explanation Of How The BSA Misleads With Piracy Stats – Excellent dissection of the dodgy stats used to overstate the financial impact of unlicensed software
• how carphone warehouse took my iphone & ruined my credit rating – I'm so glad I didn't try to get myself an iPhone. I don't think I ever will

The Nintendo Wii is an astonishing computer, the console for people who don’t play games, nestling next to the TV like a family pet and encouraging those who would normally sneer at a PlayStation to wave their arms around in order to play virtual tennis.

The Wii remote has a lot to do with its success, of course. This motion detecting wireless handheld controller gives players a far more direct sense of engagement with the game than the buttons, pads and triggers of traditional consoles, and accounts for much of the Wii’s success as a family gaming platform.

Like other games systems the Wii is as far from an open platform as you can imagine. Games cost a lot of money to develop, and Nintendo have worked hard to make it difficult to get inside the Wii for fear that easy access would allow games to be copied and distributed.

As a result you can only play licensed games, run licensed programs and do the things that Nintendo thinks you ought to, even though you’ve paid good money for the hardware.

As you might expect, this has not deterred bands of gifted programmers and engineers around the world from working hard to find and exploit the holes in the Wii’s setup that could allow access to its inner workings.

The Wii remote is just a clever Bluetooth device at heart, so it has proved to be an easy target. It can already be used to control a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, and the delightfully named ‘DarwiinRemote’ team lets your Wiimote act as remote control for Macintosh computers – the name is a pun on Darwin, one of the main components of Mac OS X.

Other members of the homebrew community, whose name comes from those who prefer to make beer at home instead of settle for industrially-manufactured stuff, have had a lot of success with the Wii itself, just as other groups have managed to open up the Xbox and PlayStation.

According to the technology site Slashdot there is now an MP3 player, a way to convert and play GameCube game files and even a port of GNU/Linux that runs on the Wii.

The developers involved, true hackers who want to know how things work and exploit the capabilities of the hardware to the full, are not aiming to pirate Super Mario Galaxy or Jenga.   They are driven by a desire to overcome the limits put in place by the manufacturer so that they can, for example, run games from older Nintendo consoles on the new platform or even write their own.

Why have a GameCube and a Wii in the living room when the Wii can do it all?  [As Mark Dooney wrote to point out, the Wii will play GameCube games, but not homebrew ones] And why have a powerful games system that won’t let you write and run your own games?

Getting it all to work can be complicated, of course. There are hardware modifications that involve soldering ‘mod chips’ onto the main circuit board, or a neat trick that uses a coding error in specific pressings of ‘The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess’.

And there is always a danger that Nintendo, caring more about potential games copying than the desires of their customers, will block these holes and prosecute the providers of mod chips as Sony and Microsoft have done in the past.

But this is unlikely to deter them.

The desire to open up the case and remove what are seen as arbitrary and capricious limitations on the way our computers operate is not limited to games consoles, of course.

It is estimated that around one third of all the iPhones sold by Apple have been unlocked so that they can run on any phone network, and the pressure to allow application developers to program the device has forced Apple to release a software developers kit.

All around the pressure is on for the developers and manufacturers of hardware to open it up for others to use creatively, instead of simply providing a set of authorised functions and expecting customers to be happy with what they are offered.

Doing this carries risks, of course, and not just the unlicensed copying of games that worries the console makers. Security flaws could be uncovered, causing problems for online services or even the back-end servers that support online games communities.

But those risks exist anyway, as we can see in the success that the hackers have had in opening up every single platform out there.  Surely it would be better to admit that there will always be a way in?

Much as I admire the skills, effort and sheer brilliance that has gone into finding ways to hack the Wii, the iPhone and the Xbox I can’t help thinking that there are better ways for us all to spend our time than a game of cat and mouse between the talented hackers who work for Apple, Microsoft and Nintendo and the talented hackers who buy their products.

Just think what brilliant software we’d have for the Wii by now if Nintendo had said ‘here’s a games console. And here are the hardware schematics – go play!’

Bill’s Links

DarwiinRemote:
All about the Wiimote:
The Zelda exploit:
Linux on the Wii:
Run GameCube games:
Slashdot coverage:
Modders criticised:
Unlocked iPhones in China: