On the previous page, we imagined 3 different companies sharing 1 server. Now, we move on to imagining the cloud.
When we start using the cloud, we think of things in terms of capacity... and stop counting. We let the people who run the servers do the counting. And we stop caring about the exact numbers of companies sharing the cloud, as long as the cloud handle handle us.
Have you ever eaten at a food buffet? You probably didn't count how many people were there... you knew there would be enough food. But, what if you weren't so hungry today, you ate half as much as the person next to you. At a buffet, you're not going only be charged half the amount. But in the cloud, you could, in theory.
Cloud computing costs are often for actual usage, not a fixed price. You use more, you pay more. You use less, you pay less.
Pretend for a second that your cell phone worked sort-of like a cloud. Before our example, you weren't using cloud pricing, you were paying $40 per month for 400 minutes. What if you only used 100 minutes, wouldn't you rather have just paid $10?
Now, many "smartphones" cost an additional $30 a month in the United States on top of a voice plan. There are 24 hours a day, in a 30 day month, that's 720 hours. Even if you used your smartphone for e-mail, browsing, etc., two hours a day, you'd still just use 60 hours in that month, or 1/12th ( about 8.34% ) the service.
Obviously, cellular technology is still being built, so they can't charge you just $2.50 a month for service. In actuality, converting the cellular networks in the United States to LTE and WiMax is going to be very expensive, so I would expect the $30 a month smartphone package to stay for quite some time.
But costs come down over time as technology advances. Boost Mobile, a prepaid phone company in the United States owned by Sprint Nextel, runs on a well established iDEN technology used by Nextel. While it doesn't have all the featues of some smartphones, the unlimited talk, text, web, and walk-talkie plan is a flat $50 a month. I imagine as 4G networks become established, the existing 3G phone plans that currently cost well over $100 for unlimited talk, text, and web may drop to a lower price, close to what Boost charges now.
So, if clouds are used for servers, how can this affect cell phones?
Using clouds allows servers to do more work than a portable device such as a cellular telephone or netbook computer would be able to do in its own. Using a processor, whether in a server, netbook, or mobile phone still uses power. In a server environment, this is not so much of a problem... it's hooked into a power grid. Cell phones and netbooks use battery power and the less it does the longer the battery will last.
Another obvious purpose of using cloud with a cell phone is this: Wouldn't it be nice if your contacts were saved to a cloud, so when you bought a new phone, the cloud could pull it down? Hopefully we'll get closer to that, someday. Humanity put a man on the moon, right?