Intel Gets Into The Personal Hub Business

Slowly, but surely, more companies are getting interested in the idea of the personal hub or the personal server. We first brought up the idea nearly 2 years ago when an outfit named IXI revealed their plans in that area. Then, in March of this year, Samsung and Motorola both announced similar projects. Now the latest company to get interested in the idea is Intel who is apparently very excited that they've come up with the idea of a personal server which sounds remarkably similar to all these other offerings - though, with more of a focus on storage than bandwidth. The idea is that, instead of worrying about bandwidth, you carry a ton of storage somewhere on your body and then use a nice little Bluetooth connection to a computer and, voila, any machine is your machine with all your data. Intel predicts that eventually this sort of personal server will get built into mobile phones, so that people only have a single box to carry around. The bet seems to be that high speed wireless bandwidth won't be fast enough or pervasive enough, that many people will feel more comfortable carrying all their data with them. Considering that many people like carrying around laptops for this very reason, they may be right. Still, as bandwidth does increase and spread, that could change over time.