Yesterday there was some discussion on Twitter amongst a few of us (@jabancroft, @harrisja and some others I’m forgetting) about the information that new software for the iPhone/iTouch will allow for over-the-air (OTA) updating of podcasts by downloading them directly to the device instead of being downloaded to a computer with iTunes, then synced.
I made a comment that this would be a killer feature, since I’d love to have all of my podcasts automatically downloaded to the device. On further thought, I realized that would only work on the iPhone (the iTouch would need to use wifi and would probably be less automatic). Josh noted that it probably wouldn’t be fully automatic, but rather a notification that new podcasts were available, with the user able to choose which ones to download. He suggested that the “download everything automatically/continuously” device would/should be one’s PC.
Here’s the deal: I’m tired of having to use my PC as a middleman to get content from the cloud to mobile devices. For music, I need to run iTunes on a computer so that it can download from the internet and then push content to my iPod. If I want to sync my Blackberry contacts to any number of online services, I’m forced to use a PC (probably running Outlook) as a conduit to move data back and forth.
When can I eliminate the PC middleman and just have my mobile devices send/receive data from the cloud?
[tags]mobile, cloud, itunes, ipod, blackberry[/tags]
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At first I was also excited about this, and thought that I’d be able to create my own RSS feed of things that I’d like in ‘podcast’ form for digest on my iPhone when I’m away from my computer. But alas, I then realized that this new feature will likely only apply to podcasts listed in the iTunes Podcast directory. There are even ‘shows’ that I listen to who don’t fall under the technical specification of a podcast, which I won’t be able to listen to with my own method. So in that case, the middleman, my home Mac, serves an invaluable purpose: Allowing me to bend the rules imposed on my device, or to break these rules to use my device how I wish.
The idea of cloud computing is great, except that each implementation is different and only applies to a specific domain area – typically a specific service (in this case podcasts via iTunes) which have inherent limitations that make it near useless.
I’ll be really excited when generalized cloud computing is available (something probably between iTunes-in-the-Cloud and EC2).