This means we might be able to make a literal version of the hitchhikers guide. All of human knowledge in your hand, no network connectivity needed.
When combined with ubiquitous 4G coverage, all they'll ever need to stream are the limitless persistent auth tokens, as locking and unlocking assets as frequently as bandwidth will allow, while remaining profitable.
I bet some of the greediest and most tyrranical IP controllers will have 1:1 authentication ratios, with each and every text character, audio sample and pixel per video frame, such that they'll never reduce bandwidth, and even create backlogs of access history, for billing purposes, when network connectivity returns.
Yes, because you accessed five seconds of full motion video, and witnessed content in which Lady Gaga's eyes moved five pixels to the left, while she pronounced a fricative syllable in the third verse of her top 40 hit single, you now owe Viacom 1/20th of one cent. NOTE: Costs do not include third-party fees covering closed-captioning for the hearing impared.
When I saw that the film Defiance was based on a interesting-sounding real set of events, I looked at them on Wikipedia. The history and talk pages had an ongoing edit war with a sizable number of commentators who appeared to feel that the Bielskis should be treated as criminals and murderers rather than fêted as heroes, due to their killing of local Nazi sympathisers.
If you just stuck to the hashed-out Wikipedia page that was current, you'd be completely oblivious to the whole controversy.
That service is just grafted on there, it's not a necessity.
It's the google way of doing things.
There are other navigation apps that do store offline maps; the reason they're not popular outside of outdoor enthusiasts is that they take up a huge amount of space. It seems like a reasonable trade-off to me.
Cell phones could easily provide navigation capabilities for at least the country of origin of the buyer and several around it if the creators decided this was a desirable thing.
All of the US is 1GB. See here: (dutch):
http://www.laptopshop.nl/vragen/29528/115735/tomtom-navigato...
Flash runs a few $ / G. Of course your phone manufacturer will screw you completely on the memory when you buy it (the price difference between a 16G and a 32G phone is ridiculous, but I guess I can't fault them as long as people fall for tricks like that).
Yeah but it won't also have several GB of games, audio, apps and photos on it as well. People would cry bloody murder if they found out google was using 7 GB of space to cache the world map by default.
If you are a person who needs a world map at their fingertips there are apps for that but the average person just needs google maps to figure out what turn the should take occasionally.
I've been holding out from the smartphone revolution for quite a while now, but a phone that would do off-line navigation would be a good thing because that means one less thing to carry along.
I don't like having services forced upon me when a single download would suffice.
Haven't looked at the pro pricing or feature list, just having maps that my off-network, GPS equipped old brick can use near home is sweet enough.
If you use Android, check out OsmAnd. It uses the same OSM maps, has navigation (with voice pack too) and it's free for up to 8 countries IIRC. I have been using it for about three months and it works pretty good.
The only problem I found is that city names for some countries are in local language, so if you go to Greece for example, you would have to type in the names in Greek letters. It they fixed this, it would be perfect.
Also, the free version allows for 10 downloads, where updating a previously downloaded map (which might only be a region of a country) counts as one of them. But the paid version is only $8.
Search for your area. Pull up info sheet for it. Click "Save map to use offline". (Although I've got no idea if it checks for changes)
Reduced the utility considerably imho.
Both Navigon and Co-Pilot (on Android) can store the entire U.S. in about 1.5 GB.
Zim reader was the best I could do, and still is the best at the moment. But I would be totally fine with dedicating a few terabytes to keeping much more complete local archives on my file-server if the update process was reasonably automatic (something like bittorrent would be great).
Zim is a desktop wiki app.