Airstash brings wireless storage to iPhone

C'mon people. Look at the photo again.

It has a power button. It is bigger than a set of keys. It's almost as big as an iPhone itself. It's clearly a USB SD card reader with Wi-Fi. It charges via your computers USB port.

They are using the hardware communication API's that came with OS 3.0. They will probably have a file browsing app that will open documents, music, photos, and videos.

Cloud? Wireless charging? Let's stay on the ground here.

Very interesting indeed. But based on the way the iPhone is designed, I can't see this being used for anything other than data storage. I can't for example see this working to hold apps, or better yet, music. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a point in getting a higher capacity 3GS for example.

If I'm (hopefully) wrong, then I'll all over this!

A very interesting device, I hope its use isn't limited to just the iPhone.

It would be even cooler if it had a female USB port, so you could plug in a flash drive and access its files wirelessly.

IMHO your buddies over at engadget have the right idea about this thing. Uploading something to a portable drive like device only to have it upload to a cloud sounds redundant and slow, i'd rather sync my files over my much faster desktop broadband connection to sync to a cloud (ala dropbox or the likes).

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/04/airstash-expands-your-iphones-storage-wirelessly/

I'm guessing it's acting as a wifi basestation with limited range, powered by a small USB-rechargeable lithium polymer battery. You probably configure the settings when it's plugged into the USB port on your laptop. At least that's what I'm hoping. :)

I think they invented wireless power so the usb thingy dont need a battery becude it uses the iphones battery via wifi :)

Has anyone noticed that iDisk is extremely slow in comparison to dropbox? What's the deal with that?

as others above me have said, the cloud doesn't make sense.

i suspect there's an accompanying app so the phone can see the "server"

http://airstash.com/

Pocketable Wireless Media Server

"a logical solution would be that AirStash automatically syncs its contents with an off-site server"

Based on the product description, and the fact that this is a portable device meant to be carried along with your iPhone, it would be completely *illogical* to think that this is some cloud-based storage device.

If it was cloud based, why would you have to carry this around with you?

I'm betting on the extra storage being accessible via Bluetooth...or some other close-range wireless communication.

"a logical solution would be that AirStash automatically syncs its contents with an off-site server"

That doesn't make any logical sense at all. It seems much more logical, based on the very limited information, that AirStash is a "portable wireless media server". Meaning it's not cloud at all. It's expandable and communicates wirelessly, meaning it needs physical presence, not cloud presence. It probably communicates via wifi, though could be bluetooth as well I suppose.