Network Storage for Your Phone

Emru already blogged about this over at our Digital World blog, but it seems worth a mention here, too: One of the buzziest product intros here at the DEMO show in Palm Springs is Seagate's pocket-sized, Bluetooth-connected hard drive for use with mobile phones.

Known as D.A.V.E.--which is short for Digital Audio Video Experience--the unit is smaller than my business-card case. You can pair it was a phone via Bluetooth, whereupon it'll upload a Java applet that lets the phone connect wirelessly to the drive and anything stored on it--music, video, pictures, documents, or whatever. And because it's all done with Bluetooth, D.A.V.E. can stay in your pocket even while you're accessing stuff stored on it.

Phones are the most obvious applications for this sort of external drive, since most of them don't have mammoth amounts of built-in capacity. But Seagate says that D.A.V.E. or D.A.V.E.-like devices could also talk to car electronics systems, cameras, and other devices.

The company says that its power-management gives D.A.V.E. surprisingly good battery life--about 10 hours of data streaming, and 14 days in standby mode. The company says that it hopes to work with phone companies to sell versions of the gadget branded under those companies' names, and may sell a Seagate version too. It says the price should be in the $150-$200 range, and that it hopes that products will arrive in stores by this Summer.

Oh, how much space does D.A.V.E. give you? 10GB for starters--which is more than any form of phone-friendly flash memory can currently provide. Seagate says that a 20GB version will be available later this year, and 40GB should be doable by 2008.

Here's a photo of the D.A.V.E. unit (on the right) sitting next to a phone for the sake of size comparisons:

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