So as you all know, people are moving more and more toward wireless communication. Phones, for a while now, no wires. Networks have been wireless. Now it looks like we will be getting wireless power for our small devices, yay!
But one thing has not been made wireless yet… Peripheral devices…
Now you can say “Hey what about Bluetooth!”. Yes, yes, that technology, well the thing is you have to mate a sender and a receiver together. And not all PCs have a Bluetooth adapter.
Why is this such a huge inconvenience for me?? I’m glad you asked. Lets look at the humble thumb drive. Its a good device. It allows me to share data with all of my computers plus share certain types of data with others. It has one major annoyance though… You have to plug it in!
If I had a Bluetooth thumb drive, I would have to sit down, and configure their adapter to talk to my thumb drive; at this point I might as well plug my thumb drive in. 😦
So now one might ask “Wait, if your drive is wireless, than anyone can access it!!”. Yes, this is true, this can be solved by adding a way to validate the user for access to some of the data (A password for example). You could have the authentication as part of the device or just encrypt the device itself. You could even leave some directories as unencrypted so that anyone my access them (I think this would be useful because there exists some data that I wouldn’t care if people took).
It could be even more controllable, you could have user accounts setup on the device in a *nix fashion.
Granted this is giving the user a lot of control and the ability to f*** things up, but I could find usages for it. I also think that this would be a good way for multiple devices to talk with each other, with out the use of a computer as an intermediary. Say for example you want to move some files from your digital camera to your thumb drive or your friends thumb drive. Or just have every one bring their cell phone for a share fest (Quick, people with IP look away!).
Finally, some systems have the ability to scan bar-codes. You could store authentication information in the bar-code to get access to the data stored in the device, or maybe the bar-code also has a command to move data a round.
Well, what about when you want to transfer really big files, or need to live stream video?? You ask good questions! So in this case, you will need to plug-in. What you are doing is way to heavy for an ad hoc wireless communication thingy. I’ll bet most data to be transferred would be photos, documents, or other small things. I am also willing to bet that the average person wouldn’t mind waiting a little longer for large file to transfer if they didn’t need to know what pocket their drive was in. 😉
If no one has really thought of this idea, you can use it as long as you cite me as the originator, and you keep the standards open. This will never work if companies patent it, and make others pay for usage. I don’t care if I don’t get rich.
So hurry up and make this! I am tired of plugging stuff into USB and other odd annoying ports.