4K Smartphones and storage problems

As the 4K television lumbers into the market, frustrating consumers around the country who just recently jumped into the SmartTV market and now are realizing that they own yesterday’s model already, so too come devices that can shoot video and photos that support the stronger resolution. No, not expensive cameras or video equipment, but Smartphones.

Acer just announced the first Smartphone that features the capability to shoot video in full 4K resolution. The Acer Liquid S2 is powered by a 2.2GHz processor Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core, with 2GB of RAM. It comes with 16GB internal storage, which will allow up to 28 seconds of stunning 4K video to be stored on the device. The device is expandable to 128GB of external microSD storage.

In all seriousness, the device will be able to hold more than half a minute of video, but 16GB for 4K video that is already competing for storage space with photos, games and apps will get shallow in a real hurry. The expandable memory is a nice addition but even 128GB will feel small, fast. If you’re a parent with new children expand that photo storage space to last you all of a week.

This points to the increasing need for better cloud storage options, but most of the solutions either available or in flight are being built to a storage need circa 2010. The capacity required is growing exponentially and the rush of 4K devices is hardly going to stop with the Acer Liquid. Given that networked storage options have been time consuming to build, the goals many companies are working toward are already hopelessly out of date with where the market is going. Studies are extremely mixed in the exact statistics, but even the most conservative estimates now say that 60% of all photos taken are taken from a Smartphone… which in turn increases the need for both storage space and network capacity. The 4K Smartphone will only exacerbate the problem, regardless of if the user has a 4K television or not. Soon, 20MB photos are going to be zooming through the air to Grandma, hammering the network and mail servers in one swoop.

The opportunity is certainly here for makers of smart storage solutions… SanDisk presented their product line at Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference and certainly sees the impending problem and hopes to capitalize on it. For the rest of us, it means getting smarter about technology and how we intend to leverage it. It also means taking a hard look at projects that have slogged along for the last 2-3 years… and perhaps facing up to the reality that the technology space is still moving extremely fast and those that shuffle find themselves behind and spending a lot of money to catch up.

More on the Acer Liquid:

The Liquid S2 features a 13-megapixel auto-focus, f2.2, rear camera with a BSI sensor and an LED ring flash that includes 4 LEDs. The marquee feature of the phone is 4K video capture which means it can shoot video in a resolution 4 times more than that of HD (high definition). It can also capture fast full-HD 1080p videos at 60 frames per second and videos in 4x slow motion. The phone sports a 2-megapixel front-facing camera that allows consumers to capture picture with an 88-degree wide viewing angle. It offers the ability to take pictures right from the lock screen, among several other imaging tricks.

 

Connectivity options on the Liquid S2 include 3G and 4G LTE, and it also supports Wi-Fi 802.11ac, the new high-speed Wi-Fi standard, seen earlier on the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4. Acer Liquid S2 phone runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, which is not the latest version of the operating system.

 

The Liquid S2 will be available in Red and Black color variants, at the end of October. The exact pricing and availability of the phone will be announced at a later stage.