Where are not there (yet)
I was skimming Apple’s related announcements at CES and I stumbled upon Toshiba Transfer Jet.
The fact that tools like this are still invented (and probably sold) makes me think we are not there yet. The dream of moving one file from a device to another is in fact still paved with complicated requirements. This led me to inspect the requirements to use AirDrop, which are pretty high, considering the following facts:
- There’s still lots of iPhone 4S and iPad 2nd generation out there
- Not everybody has upgraded to Yosemite yet
- Not everybody has an iDevice
The problem of transferring a file in a p2p fashion could be easily solved by running an app that starts an HTTP server and shares a folder. That’s it, really. On another device you visit the URL via the browser and download/upload what you want. This is how VLC worked for example. You still need a WiFi connection, but that’s pretty easy to find nowadays. Bluetooth would be ideal because it does not even require a WiFi but the odds of finding two phones (beloging to different platforms) with a Bluetooth chipset that is “compatible enough” to allow a file transfer seem pretty low to me.
My point is that I would love to see the “trasfer problem” solved via software tools, instead of a hardware dongle that you might forget or not have handy when you need it. But it seems we are not there (yet).