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Comment by legulere | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if smartphone capacities grew we would one day hit a point where most meaningful data is already preloaded on every device: A full copy of Wikidata, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, dictionaries.

The trend goes the complete opposite direction: the devices get faster but we only use it to draw the data from our servers faster. We push all our data into the cloud, although our devices share a private network most of the time.

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By the current state of the mobile world, you'd have a special Apple vetted copy of Wikipedia with no mention of their competitors, adult themes or anything that could remotely be percieved as offensive to anyone ;)

Except guns. Guns would be included. Because everyone follows American culture.

Because only guns kill:

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/teacher-who-allegedl...

If manufacturers would stop removing the SD card slots we might already be at that point. What do you consider a "full" copy of OSM and how big is that?

~44GB compressed. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm

That was in reach of my Nokia N900 in 2009. 32GB internal storage with a 32GB SD card. We've gone backwards*

* Yes, it'd fit on any 128GB device, I guess.

Ah, the 29.3GB PBF might be better, I don't know about the CPU/RAM requirements of it though.

But in a Postgres + PostGis it is more than 300GB, and you can add a tile cache or it will be too slow.

Agree, that's uncompressed and with all of the required scaffolding. I would still argue that in the next few years, you'll be able to carry an entirely functional OSM system around with you, tile cache and all (Samsung is predicting 128TB SSDs by 2018).

The offline maps like Osmand and whatnot elide a bunch of data and include indexes, and last I did the arithmetic, were in the vicinity of 50 GB. Numbers here:

http://download.osmand.net/rawindexes/

(Note that there are duplicated areas and wikipedia extracts in there, so a simple sum will be an overestimate)

The concern with not having access to data on a device is that the platform controllers are in full control over the data then. Whether it's a control method or simply a connectivity issue, it will be nice to have access to data. Having device differentiation focused on speed of data transfer vs. stored data seems reasonable.

It's rarely in the carrier's best interest to reduce demand for their services, but for those who take the initiative this is not only possible, but practical. Android software in particular offers many offline or intermittent connection options. A 128GB microSD these days is affordable.

Maps:Osmand, MAPS.ME News: RSS reader (take your pick) Wikipedia: Kiwix Podcasts:Antennapod

Up and coming distributed technologies like Rumble put in question the absolute necessity of a centralized network at all.

http://www.disruptedsystems.org/

Wikipedia: Aard2 dictionary (Android) http://aarddict.org

I've been thinking about this recently. Our phones have so much connectivity yet that allow them to be smarter than us. But you can be dropped in a new location without signal and suddenly you know more than your phone. It's a strange thing.

Yes I believe our phones should have a base level of 'knowledge' stored about our world which doesn't rely on connectivity to a server. Updates could be made either continuously or with each OS update, but they should happen regardless.

The trend is set by mobile phone companies who subsidize and thus influence the hardware that works on their networks and of course Google, who profit from the large datasets stored in Their cloud.

For these trends to reverse right now would require a nonprofit phone manufacturer and people would need to be willing to pay full price for hardware.

Providers of the cell phones want to charge you for your data usage over their network. They aren't going to pre-load the most commonly accessed data on the phones.

I don't get my smartphone from a carrier. I get it from a manufacturer. The carrier is a commodity.

We are the minority. Most people have a cellphone because it's price is heavily subsidized. They also only use it for calls, SMS and facebook...

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