The Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona passed unnoticed, according to this pseudo-pandemic time in which we live, but it did not do so without leaving some other curiosity like this one that we rescued in extremis because its mere mention is worth it: ' the smartphone in the cloud', a project that is being developed by Vodafone in collaboration with Canonical.
Said as it is, «smartphone in the cloud», I can already imagine what you are imagining: a Chromebook-style mobile … or perhaps something in the style of the disappeared Firefox OS? It has a bit of both, but also a different approach that, however, takes us back to those times when Canonical was working on an Ubuntu Touch that has nothing to do with the current one due to its multiplatform nature.
We are talking about convergence, yes, but not the longed-for convergence, but rather another, "a new technology that uses Anbox Cloud and the power of smart mobile networks to transform televisions, computers, portable devices and other everyday objects into" smartphones in the cloud," explains Canonical. That is the concept of the smartphone in the cloud.
Specifically, this smartphone in the cloud would work on Anbox Cloud, Canonical's Android application distribution platform that emerged from the Anbox project (Android in a Box) that allows running Android applications on Linux. The peculiarity of Anbox Cloud, needless to add, is that these applications run directly from the cloud as a service.
Taking advantage of their time at MWC, they showed a prototype smartphone in the cloud that worked like this, running not only the applications, but an entire virtualized Android system in the cloud, including, of course, all the applications. Advantages? The bulk of the processing load is done in a remote environment, so the technical characteristics of the device can be minimal: a good connection is more important than powerful hardware.
But don't throw your hands in your head… yet, because this smartphone in the cloud is initially focused on the distribution of software such as SaaS (software as a service) or PaaS (platform as a service) and its entry niche It will be corporate. Of course, everything is moving in the same direction and given the commercial advantages for those who provide this kind of service, it is only a matter of time to see it in the consumer market.
