Wouldn’t that be neat for to have for the Librem 5?
Big (!), fast, energy efficient.
Yes, I know… probably costs half the phone price…
According to this German news article, it’s now available with 500GB, but notoriously they gave no source…
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Honestly, what do people do on their phones that requires crazy storage capacities? I only ever reached the top of my phone’s 16GB when I was going through a silly “audiophile” stage and trying to store music as ALAC files instead of M4A like any sane person does.
Is it all games and stuff? I’ve never been able to understand it because I seriously just download a few messaging apps and maybe a GPS. Oh and Reddit, of course.
But yeah… freaking 500GB on a phone?
Puts on the voice of Moss from the IT Crowd: It can’t be done, you’re crazy!!
Between system data, music (mostly in .mp3), and apps, I’ve maxed out my 32GB phone. That said, there’s not much I’ve had to decide to remove, so 64 GB is probably good enough for me, and 128 GB should absolutely last a while based on my current phone usage.
However, if the Librem 5 aims for convergence (which I believe is part of the advertised goal), then 500GB seems far less crazy. If you imagine the Librem 5 being an ultra portable, all-in-one phone + desktop computer swap in, on which you want many types of data (multimedia, office suite type documents/spreadsheets/presentations, coding projects, maybe even datasets for various analyses, though that becomes less likely given the computational limitations), 500GB isn’t insane. Your phone starts to become an interactive flash drive (though that isn’t a flattering way of putting it).
I don’t think we’ll be seeing 500GB in the Librem 5 v1 though.
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The storage on my 128G pixel is always getting full; photos, videos, music, podcasts, audiobooks, offline maps, etc… I pay google for more storage, but still have to sync to my local nas in order to avoid a huge bill.
I could easily fill 500GB within a year.
A large extended family with lots of trips and celebrations generates tons of photos and videos. It is honestly fun to show my kids what they were like 2, 5, 10 yrs ago.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug 
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Exactly.
And maybe kids born in 2018 will have a hard time believing that we had phones that could not double as a computer…
Also, if you think about a device that aims for freedom, privacy, independence - in other words not cloud services based, storage becomes even more important. Think
- offline map data and routing algorithms
- offline dictionaries, encyclopedias, translators
- voice recogintion + text to speech (I’m actually not sure if that needs notable storage, but i guess a GB is wasted easily)
Here’s an interview on EndlessOS, where they even put an offline Wikipedia on devices, mostly for bandwith purposes, not privacy. It’s a really interesting project.
Anyway, one can hardly have too much space on a phone
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Fair enough. I’m a minimalist who doesn’t keep much on his person so maybe I just can’t understand for that reason. I actually reformat my whole computer once every 3-4 months out of paranoia and to “get rid of clutter” and update/optimize everything.
I also like to strictly define and streamline the purpose of things. I think the more functions an object has the worse at each of those functions it becomes. I’ll never own a “washer-dryer” or anything like that.
Needless to say I suppose I’m a rather… special case.
Anyway, well I hope this “convergence” aspect doesn’t make the phone too different from what I’m used to.
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500 GB on a phone would be awesome. And yes we do use storage on phones. English wikipedia is 61GB with pictures. Openstreetmap for the entire world is probably about 10GB (i’m just estimating there). Other major databases use a lot too. And why do I want all that you ask? So I can’t be tracked. Nobody can know what maps I look at if they are on my phone. Same goes for wikipedia articles.f
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Ha! I remember those days with Windows98. I literally had the CD on my HDD so I could reinstall it faster ^^
On convergence: Well, if you don’t want LibreOffice on your phone to connect it to a screen, just remove it.
Other than that: It’s not the amount of things that’s installed that makes stuff slow (that is amount of poor background daemons) or unstable (that is amount of poorely written, running apps).
Full bitcoin client uses 145GB of blockchain data nowadays. So yeah, a potential use for GB is out there.
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Fair enough. I just categorize things like Bitcoin as a desktop thing that I wouldn’t do on a phone.
Same goes for most browsing too actually. I don’t use YouTube or anything on my phone. Phone is just a communications device for me and I wouldn’t use it for things like Bitcoin clients or backups of Wikipedia etc.
Heck, those kinda things are what I’d dedicate entire external hard drives to.
Phones are just something I want to text, call, and take photos on for the most part. I feel like those other things just aren’t meant for phones and desktops will do the jobs far faster and better.
I like to have all my music library on my phone so I can chose music for every mood. That means 100G is a minimum.
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Yeah, music is where I can see people using a lot of memory. Though I don’t have that expansive of a collection of music since I just tend to decide to stream anything I wanna listen to in the moment.
I do hope that the Librem 5 will be a lot easier to just drag-n-drop files into though. Would make it a lot simpler to insert media I get from… alternative sources.
iPhones and stuff kinda give you a hard time if files don’t have proper metadata. Makes it more difficult to just throw pirated music or audio you ripped off YouTube onto it, I find myself having to go through a process of using tagscanner to add required details to the files.
That said, shit, 100GB of music? I kinda just go through phases where I listen to the same few albums for a month or two until I get bored of it. Then I delete them and find something else to add. I’m the kinda person that gets sickly obsessed with something for a month or two until I burn-out on it and get bored of it.
well I’m purchasing on Google play store, downloading and dropping zips on SDXC card and extracting zips in-place. Yes, double size consuming but that’s sd card - sometimes files get’s corrupted, sometimes sd card decides to go to sleep during playback… not very convenient.
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Absolutely… Local data storage is king. Hopefully can have an SD reader that supports upcoming cards of bigger sizes. Speaking of which… I wonder if somehow phone could also mount an external drive… Even by using a common/generic/cheap USB hub.
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