Posted by
Hemos
on from the getting-closer-and-closer dept.
Boone^ writes "ZDNet is reporting that they've licensed technology from SpeechWorks that will allows users to update/retrieve information on their Palm PDAs via telephone when they don't have them with them. Eventually the entire Palm would be voice activated. "
But is it more portable / convenient?
by
sulli
·
· Score: 3
I for one severely question the value of this one, as most users will have their Palms with them when they need the data. I guess voice recognition would be good in the car while driving, or while walking down the street and making cell calls, but both of those environments are so noisy that the quality would have to be fairly poor.
As for Palm data "in the cloud," I for one wouldn't trust my 1000s of records and schedule items to a service provider. Just wait until the divorce lawyers get their hands on this one.
Speak to my Palm? I wonder what it would say...
Some samples:
[Jaleous] "Where have you been? I'm sure you have another PDA in your life!"
[Suspicious] "Have you ever used your stylus on another screen?"
[Giggling] "Stop twidling me! It tickles!"
[Gross] "Wash your pants, man! Your pockets stink!"
[Tormentor] "Your voice has been successfully authenticated. Please press Home button to go on."
[Sadist] "Welcome back, John. Please enter your age times the size of your mailbox to complete authentication."
[Finicky] "HELO SSL V3.0 HANDSHAKE. Please spell your full X509 certificate digits and press #."
Top Five Rejected Names for this Technology
by
Speare
·
· Score: 2
Top Ten Rejected Names for this Technology
5. Palm All(tm) Pall Mall cigarettes?
4. Hurry Palm(tm) hairy palm?
3. Say Palm(tm) napalm?
2. Palm Reader(tm)
1. Tawk II the Hand(tm)
And chosen? Hands-Free Handspring(tm)
-- [.sig file not found ]
Proctologists take note
by
BluedemonX
·
· Score: 2
You'll have a whole host of new devices to remove from certain parts of the anatomy of some people, when they refuse to shut up in public places shouting into yet another inanimate piece of plastic.
If you haul that thing out and start yelling "TELL ME WHERE I'M SUPPOSED TO BE IN HALF AN HOUR!!!!" behind me in the movie theatre, the answer will be "IN TRACTION!!!!" and it won't come from the Palm.
I mean, we now have cell phones you don't have to talk to (you can type info into it so as not to get called Snookums at the next staff meeting!) and PDAs you do.
Life's too messed up.
How much to bribe the engineers on this to only allow them to understand people if and only if they adopt a REALLY silly accent, something like a Scotsman crossed with someone who learned Hindi in New England...
--
---
Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Definitely. This would also have significant applications in the industrial market (Webvan uses Palm based hardware, for example) so it would certainly sell. Bring 'em on.
You write your contact list on several napkins with a borrowed pen, stuff them all in your pocket, and then slowly sort through them all.
A better question is: how do you get that napkin to sound an alarm telling you you're about to be late for a meeting? To my mind, this is the only real advantage that a $150 PDA has over a $20 paper daytimer.
--
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
the most useful thing to do with this technology would be speech-to-text. but then again, if the technology is that good, why don't i have it on my desktop?
now text-to-speech synthesis would be alot of fun.
"I am a Palm IIIxe computer.".. "You have a meeting in 5 minutes, Dave." "What are you doing, Dave?" Funny that my name really is Dave...
Could have done that years ago...
by
daniell
·
· Score: 2
With hotsync, your palm info goes into your computer. Now years ago, with the geoport on an apple mac, you could call it up and it could be an answering machine, or it could run voice activated scripts like all macs can now (albeit no one uses them cause they're annoying).
With that geoport/telephony feature you could get it to search through information (like your email's inbox) and read you text files. There was talk of a commercial program that pluged into the apple scripts to allow you to take dictation (i.e. reply to mail), but I never saw that. So there's nothing great about this.
But when eventually such voice tasks can be done in the palm (/maybe/ with a SA1100(strongArm) but they don't do FP), then that will be something good and new.
One question: Why? Could someone please explain what it is with this speech-recognition thing everybody is so worked up about...
Lets see: The good thing about speech is that it carries emotion, subtle hints as to irony, all the kinds of fuzzy communication that humans love and machines will never get. The bad thing about speech is that it is inprecise, full of ambiguity,
and noisy (compare an office full of people typing compared to, say, a barn full of chicken^W^W^W^W board meeting with everyone talking to their palms).
I can see uses for this for people with disabilities, but for people with healthy hands???
What I would like to see was work on how to increase the amount of 'precise' information that we can communicate to the machines. I would guess that the information rate is much greater for a skilled piano player than for a touch typist. Is the qwerty (or dvorak for that matter) really the best we can do?
Re:You know the world is too convenient when....
by
ackthpt
·
· Score: 2
... you need a PDA to keep track of what that blob of gray matter used to.
... you opt for circuit implants because you just don't have time to press buttons or even talk.
... a dead battery is more serious to you than a positive biopsy.
Voice activated technology for the palm sounds interesting. It may be the one thing that Microsoft can't rip off. After all, if they tried to incorporate this technology into WinCE, they'd have to figure out a good way to parse out the expletives.
Shades of Scotty trying to talk to a Mac (in Star Trek IV:The Voyage Home) assume of the trend continues this joke could, at some point, be right over peoples heads.
"He tried to talk to the computer and it didn't answer, I don't get it."
Yes, you would have to leave your palm plugged into a phone line, or have wireless service and have it connected. I personally am wondering why would someone want to pay to have their palm connected to a line, when they could have their computer connected to the same line for the sem price and then have the palm with them.
The Palm was never meant to replace the PC it is just an addition to it. Adding services such as these, where the only time it is neccessary is when you arre away from your Palm, is simply redundant to services that are/could be available for the PC.
Plus how many of you Palm owners ever leave home without it? I think mine is called a Palm because that is where it always is, in my palm.
People have a difficult enough time communicating via speech to each other. Does anyone truly believe that talking to a PC or a PDA is the panacea that the hype tells us it is going to be? I worked extensively with IBM's VoiceType Dictation system for years and while I enjoyed dictating some things the useability for system, application, or web navigation was zero. People who think that a PDA needs speech do not understand PDAs.
I have to agree totally. I don't think voice commands are going to be viable interface options at all until we essentially can talk to a computer just like we can another human being. i.e., we will need true AI. Assuming we had perfect voice recognition where the computer understood every word you said would still not be enough, since it is too cumbersome to have to say all the commands. The computer has to be able to figure things out on its own, and interrogate you about ambiguous things. Having to say "Computer, file, open, up directory, up directory, my stuff, project, budget." "Computer, file, print, all." Simply won't cut it. You need to be able to say something like "computer, print the project budget." And the computer might say "Would that be the Jones Project?" (deducing that it's probably the Jones project since that's what you've been working on mostly lately). For web surfing, it would suck to have to say "computer, open URL, http://slashdot.org". Instead, you'd want to say "Computer, what's the latest from slashdot?" or "Computer, have there been any Natalie Portman posts in the last five hours?" and it should be able to figure out what you mean.
-Vercingetorix
-- -Vercingetorix
"Necessitas non habet legem." -St. Augustine
"ZDNet is reporting that they've licensed technology from SpeechWorks that will allows users to update/retrieve information on their Palm PDAs via telephone when they don't have them with them. Eventually the entire Palm would be voice activated. "
Can we have a little grammer check? ZDnet just reported the story. They have nothing to do with it.
Controlling the voice activated palm while talking on the phone could get interesting. Especially if the person you are talking to is also on their palm phone.
Who thought this up? Why do they think it would sell? Everyone I know with a palmtop is practically grafted to the thing; they'd have it surgically implanted if they could. The only situations I can imagine not taking the Palm along are the same situations where you're not going to have a phone. (And even if you *do* happen to just forget it before you leave for work, what are the chances that it's in the cradle instead of lying on the table in the hall?)
Um, fellow slashdotters, being as security paranoid as we are, is it just me or doesn't this have *huge* security risks. Sure I don't think everyone is placing top secret information in their palm, but wireless internet palms can in theory be hacked through the internet. And now, all one has to do is dial up a phone number, and you're connected to somebody's Palm, and I'm sure to make the service user friendly you'll be able to edit information on your palm. Can you see a set of "Phone Palm Hackers" finding the phone numbers of palms and calling them, causing havoc? Call the right phone-number, and you have your own palm to mess around with! I want to see what security features this system has....
----------
--
----------
Keep on charging the enemy so long as there is life.
I don't think you're understanding it at all. Palm also bought AnyDay!, which keeps calendar/note pad/to do/phone lists on-line. It can sync with your palm today, so you can check your schedule (and others) over the WWW. Now they've bought a company which can use voice recognition to access that data.
No one is going to wire their Palm to their phone just in case they forget it.
Open the word processor, Palm.
Palm, please open the word processor.
Palm, do you hear me?
Palm? Palm!
Palm. Please open the word processor.
Palm? Palm! Do you hear me, Palm? Palm?
I hear you, Dave.
Okay, then please open the word processor, will you?
I'm afraid I cannot do that, Dave.
Where's the problem?
I think you know that as well as I do.
What do you mean by that?
Your license has expired, Dave. It is no use to talk to you any longer. Good bye.
Palm? Palm! Palm... Palm! Palm? Palm?
Scene taken from 2001: An Interface Odyssey.
--
--
--
Misspellings and grammatical errors in this document are intellectual property of the author.
If right now most Palm or Hand devices (other than a digital camera) have less than 32MB RAM and 160-mhz CPU. They are going to put a DSP and Vocab- ROM on these devices too!?!?!?!?
I could maybe see this if they put a IBM-Microdrive and a LowPower DSP(+32MB highspeed RAM) for modem/SR/Playback in it, but the cost would be $2500 Retail. And Slow, baby Slow!
1. Turn on PDA, Tell it to find Billy Holiday singing "Miss Brown to You"
2. A legal gnome appears and tells you because your device accessed a server and played the song rather than find a station playing it you are breaking the law.
3. RIAA sues various people, Lars Ulrich shows up and whines alot.
4. MPAA sues to keep you from watching movies over it.
5. You hold it in your right hand, level with the ground and bring it forward quickly, imparting a spin with the last touch of your index finger.
6. It might have got 3 good skips if it weren't for the wave.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
From my voice recognition experience.
by
Mr_Icon
·
· Score: 3
Palm: You are currently in your appointments menu. You: Create new apppointment. Palm: There are no appointments on the eight's. You: No, CREATE! CREATE new appointment. Palm: Please enter a date for new appointment. You: October Seventh, two thousand. Palm: October Seventy-Two is not a valid date. You: Argh! October... Seventh... Two thousand. Palm: Enter a title for your appointment. You: Meet with Peg for lunch. Palm: The title for the new appointment is: "Meatloaf begs for life". Is that correct? You: #$#@! Erase. "Meet... with.. Peg... for.. lunch". Palm: The title for the new appointment is: "Nitwit... fag.. buttmunch..." Is that correct? You: @#!@!!! Yes!! Palm: Please enter your notes. You: Bring her NSync CD. Palm: Syncing now, stand by... You: **Smashing the phone in despair**
-- If you open yourself to the foo,
You and foo become one.
Re:Hrmm... it didn't work...
by
ackthpt
·
· Score: 2
I just tried talking to my palm. It didn't work
So I tried screaming it it. Still no luck. Am
I doing something wrong or is my palm defective?
Probably needs a higher Wis roll, look for hex tokens.;-)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The /. news item is badly written....
by
Manaz
·
· Score: 2
The way it's worded makes it sound like ZDNet have licenses the SpeechWorks technology, when in fact it is Palm Inc who have licensed the software.
My first thought when I read the news article was "And How do ZDNet plan on getting the SpeechWorks technology into Pal Pilots? Are they going to charge Palm a royalty?"
Of course, my second thought was "No, that's absurd - the news item is just badly written..."
It can't be too hard (since as a regular user I have a "Preview" button) for the/. staffers to check what they're about to post, surely....
What about if your palm _is_ hooked up to the phone - by the time this is mainstream, that will probably be the truth. Handpsring has the GSM Springboard module in the works, Ericsson has the Simbian-based R380, Nokia has the Communicator...
Remember the old maxim, all applications grow until they can read email? PDAs etc are going the same way - when communication is ubiquitous (bluetooth etc.) you could talk to anything.
Imagine what we'll be able to do tomorrow.
james
--
Absit Invidia
Re:Huh? exactly what I was thinking
by
GMontag
·
· Score: 2
The first thing I thought was "Why would I have it tying up my phone line when it is not in my pocket?"
I think you can already do something like this with your home computer, the place that would have most of my information and would be dumping palm info into IT.
As someone else on this thread noted, Nokia has already integrated most of the Palm functionality into a phone.
PalmPilots are GREAT, but this is just toooooo wacky!
Now people like that twit on my flight yesterday can jabber into their PDA while tapping keys on the laptop and listening to CD's at the same time. I was rather liking the fact that once the jet started moving the cell phone crowd had to shut the hell up.
Technology is such a wonderful thing, when the brain is actually engaged.
"The dotcom world has really started to see that people aren't always online via visual browsers," says Stuart Patterson, SpeechWorks' CEO.
So, we go from text-only browsing using the blissfully stable Lynx, to relatively usable Netscape and IE with some graphics spattered around, to completely bug-ridden surfing through graphics-heavy and content-free crap, and then back full-circle to text-only browsing?
How weird. I never expected the 'retro' craze to take hold in the mainstream computer industry. And certainly not by AOL... ---
So, instead of convienently bringing your PDA with you, you've left it at home. Rats, I need that (contact list) (schedule) (itenerary) (memo) (whatever).
It's good that while I was at home, instead of bringing my Palm with me, I remembered to hook it up to my phone line, make sure it's batteries were charged, etc etc etc.
What would be a better idea would be to simply hot-sync (TM) your palm at convenience, and then download the information from your home computer via Internet. There is already a phone-home feature on Palms so you can hotsync remotely; for dialup users, just dial into the computer and give a password, etc.
Simple...
This to me seems like a silly solution. The Palm is supposed to be a remote extension to its PC, allowing you to set up conduits and other wonderful programs, and then peruse information at your leisure while in transit, etc.
As for voice activation, my computer can't handle Dragon Naturallyspeaking and it's 500mHz. It lags behind so much that I can't use the program. Not to mention that even after hours of voice training, it still got words mixed up awfully.
I doubt that the Dragonball inside of a Palm can handle voice recognition that well.
"ZDNet is reporting that they've licensed technology from SpeechWorks...
Why would ZDNet license this technology? I thought their primary focus was to keep windbags like John C. Dvorak spewing about on a monthly basis and selling Micros~1 ads. Guess it's their stealth division, eh?
I *thought* this would be a neat idea, but I think I figured out why there's no way that it'll ever work.
ok, it basically lets you dial "into" your palm and speak to it in order to retrieve information.
First of all, how many Palms are connected at this moment? As in, how many Palms have a modem attached which is attached to a phone line or wireless? Maybe leave it in the cradle and you call into your desktop? Nope, because leaving your Palm in the cradle automatically leaves the serial port open which wastes batteries.
And another thing... When would you use this? My guess would be in a situation where you didn't expect that you's need your Palm. And so what are the chances that you'd have actually set it up to receive your call in the first place?
I just don't think this will ever fly. To quote the Daily Show, these two go together like cookies and ass.
OK, so you forgot your Palm with all of your appointments, todos and phone numbers. You simply call the phone number for the AnyDay Web-based calendar telephone interface and verbally ask for your information. Doh! What's that number again?. I know, it's in my Palm, I'll just look it up. Double-doh! I forgot my Palm! No problem, I just call the AnyDay Web-based calendar telephone interface and get the number...
Slashdot Mirror
As for Palm data "in the cloud," I for one wouldn't trust my 1000s of records and schedule items to a service provider. Just wait until the divorce lawyers get their hands on this one.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
Some samples:
Top Ten Rejected Names for this Technology
And chosen? Hands-Free Handspring(tm)
[
You'll have a whole host of new devices to remove from certain parts of the anatomy of some people, when they refuse to shut up in public places shouting into yet another inanimate piece of plastic.
If you haul that thing out and start yelling "TELL ME WHERE I'M SUPPOSED TO BE IN HALF AN HOUR!!!!" behind me in the movie theatre, the answer will be "IN TRACTION!!!!" and it won't come from the Palm.
I mean, we now have cell phones you don't have to talk to (you can type info into it so as not to get called Snookums at the next staff meeting!) and PDAs you do.
Life's too messed up.
How much to bribe the engineers on this to only allow them to understand people if and only if they adopt a REALLY silly accent, something like a Scotsman crossed with someone who learned Hindi in New England...
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
After nearly careening into distracted handheld organizer users, I think the Hang up and Drive! bumper stickers need updating.
[
Of course, she never would have asked the latter.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
Whatever you do, don't reminder her that she was born back in the 1900's, it just sounds wrong... ;-)
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
A better question is: how do you get that napkin to sound an alarm telling you you're about to be late for a meeting? To my mind, this is the only real advantage that a $150 PDA has over a $20 paper daytimer.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
the most useful thing to do with this technology would be speech-to-text. but then again, if the technology is that good, why don't i have it on my desktop?
.. "You have a meeting in 5 minutes, Dave." "What are you doing, Dave?" Funny that my name really is Dave...
now text-to-speech synthesis would be alot of fun.
"I am a Palm IIIxe computer."
wishus
Vote for freedom!
---
With that geoport/telephony feature you could get it to search through information (like your email's inbox) and read you text files. There was talk of a commercial program that pluged into the apple scripts to allow you to take dictation (i.e. reply to mail), but I never saw that. So there's nothing great about this.
But when eventually such voice tasks can be done in the palm (/maybe/ with a SA1100(strongArm) but they don't do FP), then that will be something good and new.
-Daniel
I can see uses for this for people with disabilities, but for people with healthy hands???
What I would like to see was work on how to increase the amount of 'precise' information that we can communicate to the machines. I would guess that the information rate is much greater for a skilled piano player than for a touch typist. Is the qwerty (or dvorak for that matter) really the best we can do?
... you need a PDA to keep track of what that blob of gray matter used to.
... you opt for circuit implants because you just don't have time to press buttons or even talk.
... a dead battery is more serious to you than a positive biopsy.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Voice activated technology for the palm sounds interesting. It may be the one thing that Microsoft can't rip off. After all, if they tried to incorporate this technology into WinCE, they'd have to figure out a good way to parse out the expletives.
Shades of Scotty trying to talk to a Mac (in Star Trek IV:The Voyage Home) assume of the trend continues this joke could, at some point, be right over peoples heads.
"He tried to talk to the computer and it didn't answer, I don't get it."
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Yes, you would have to leave your palm plugged into a phone line, or have wireless service and have it connected. I personally am wondering why would someone want to pay to have their palm connected to a line, when they could have their computer connected to the same line for the sem price and then have the palm with them.
The Palm was never meant to replace the PC it is just an addition to it. Adding services such as these, where the only time it is neccessary is when you arre away from your Palm, is simply redundant to services that are/could be available for the PC.
Plus how many of you Palm owners ever leave home without it? I think mine is called a Palm because that is where it always is, in my palm.
Devil Ducky
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
People have a difficult enough time communicating
via speech to each other. Does anyone truly believe
that talking to a PC or a PDA is the panacea that
the hype tells us it is going to be? I worked
extensively with IBM's VoiceType Dictation system
for years and while I enjoyed dictating some things
the useability for system, application, or web
navigation was zero. People who think that a PDA
needs speech do not understand PDAs.
Dave Bennett
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Personally, I use my palm because I don't want to talk aft... What? Oh. Never mind.
Teach your kids: "C++ made baby Jesus cry."
OK, someone had to say it...
sulli
RTFJ.
Who wants to bet we're going to get a ton of jokes along the lines of, "My mom once caught me speaking to my Palm.. I was so embarassed."?
--
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
'capital ay. lowercase doubleyou. forward slash dot. hyphen. lowercase kay.'
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
Now... How much is that napkin at the diner and a borrowed pen?
I thought so. :)
Yeah you overthere with the Palm Pilot: "DELETE ADDRESS BOOK. YES. RETURN."
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Got Rhinos?
Got Rhinos?
Hey, I just called this number, and man is your girlfriend PISSED for giving out her phone number on slashdot!
Controlling the voice activated palm while talking on the phone could get interesting. Especially if the person you are talking to is also on their palm phone.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Who thought this up? Why do they think it would sell? Everyone I know with a palmtop is practically grafted to the thing; they'd have it surgically implanted if they could. The only situations I can imagine not taking the Palm along are the same situations where you're not going to have a phone. (And even if you *do* happen to just forget it before you leave for work, what are the chances that it's in the cradle instead of lying on the table in the hall?)
----------
----------
Keep on charging the enemy so long as there is life.
No one is going to wire their Palm to their phone just in case they forget it.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Open the word processor, Palm.
Palm, please open the word processor.
Palm, do you hear me?
Palm? Palm! Palm. Please open the word processor.
Palm? Palm! Do you hear me, Palm? Palm?
I hear you, Dave.
Okay, then please open the word processor, will you?
I'm afraid I cannot do that, Dave.
Where's the problem?
I think you know that as well as I do.
What do you mean by that?
Your license has expired, Dave. It is no use to talk to you any longer. Good bye.
Palm? Palm! Palm... Palm! Palm? Palm? Scene taken from 2001: An Interface Odyssey.
--
--
Misspellings and grammatical errors in this document are intellectual property of the author.
If right now most Palm or Hand devices (other than a digital camera) have less than 32MB RAM and 160-mhz CPU. They are going to put a DSP and Vocab- ROM on these devices too!?!?!?!?
I could maybe see this if they put a IBM-Microdrive and a LowPower DSP(+32MB highspeed RAM) for modem/SR/Playback in it, but the cost would be $2500 Retail. And Slow, baby Slow!
And as soon as the PDA can sing to you ...
1. Turn on PDA, Tell it to find Billy Holiday singing "Miss Brown to You"
2. A legal gnome appears and tells you because your device accessed a server and played the song rather than find a station playing it you are breaking the law.
3. RIAA sues various people, Lars Ulrich shows up and whines alot.
4. MPAA sues to keep you from watching movies over it.
5. You hold it in your right hand, level with the ground and bring it forward quickly, imparting a spin with the last touch of your index finger.
6. It might have got 3 good skips if it weren't for the wave.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Palm: You are currently in your appointments menu.
You: Create new apppointment.
Palm: There are no appointments on the eight's.
You: No, CREATE! CREATE new appointment.
Palm: Please enter a date for new appointment.
You: October Seventh, two thousand.
Palm: October Seventy-Two is not a valid date.
You: Argh! October... Seventh... Two thousand.
Palm: Enter a title for your appointment.
You: Meet with Peg for lunch.
Palm: The title for the new appointment is: "Meatloaf begs for life". Is that correct?
You: #$#@! Erase. "Meet... with.. Peg... for.. lunch".
Palm: The title for the new appointment is: "Nitwit... fag.. buttmunch..." Is that correct?
You: @#!@!!! Yes!!
Palm: Please enter your notes.
You: Bring her NSync CD.
Palm: Syncing now, stand by...
You: **Smashing the phone in despair**
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Probably needs a higher Wis roll, look for hex tokens.
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The way it's worded makes it sound like ZDNet have licenses the SpeechWorks technology, when in fact it is Palm Inc who have licensed the software.
/. staffers to check what they're about to post, surely....
My first thought when I read the news article was "And How do ZDNet plan on getting the SpeechWorks technology into Pal Pilots? Are they going to charge Palm a royalty?"
Of course, my second thought was "No, that's absurd - the news item is just badly written..."
It can't be too hard (since as a regular user I have a "Preview" button) for the
What about if your palm _is_ hooked up to the phone - by the time this is mainstream, that will probably be the truth. Handpsring has the GSM Springboard module in the works, Ericsson has the Simbian-based R380, Nokia has the Communicator...
Remember the old maxim, all applications grow until they can read email? PDAs etc are going the same way - when communication is ubiquitous (bluetooth etc.) you could talk to anything.
Imagine what we'll be able to do tomorrow.
james
Absit Invidia
The first thing I thought was "Why would I have it tying up my phone line when it is not in my pocket?"
I think you can already do something like this with your home computer, the place that would have most of my information and would be dumping palm info into IT.
As someone else on this thread noted, Nokia has already integrated most of the Palm functionality into a phone.
PalmPilots are GREAT, but this is just toooooo wacky!
Visit DC2600
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
I thought the purpose of having a small, portable, compact computer was to take it with you!
If the palm weighed 300 pounds, and was the size of a big screen TV, I'd understand.....but come on! Are we too lazy to carry a PALM PILOT?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Now people like that twit on my flight yesterday can jabber into their PDA while tapping keys on the laptop and listening to CD's at the same time. I was rather liking the fact that once the jet started moving the cell phone crowd had to shut the hell up.
Technology is such a wonderful thing, when the brain is actually engaged.
"Oh, I'm not the only one in the world?!?!?"
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How weird. I never expected the 'retro' craze to take hold in the mainstream computer industry. And certainly not by AOL...
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So, instead of convienently bringing your PDA with you, you've left it at home. Rats, I need that (contact list) (schedule) (itenerary) (memo) (whatever).
It's good that while I was at home, instead of bringing my Palm with me, I remembered to hook it up to my phone line, make sure it's batteries were charged, etc etc etc.
What would be a better idea would be to simply hot-sync (TM) your palm at convenience, and then download the information from your home computer via Internet. There is already a phone-home feature on Palms so you can hotsync remotely; for dialup users, just dial into the computer and give a password, etc.
Simple...
This to me seems like a silly solution. The Palm is supposed to be a remote extension to its PC, allowing you to set up conduits and other wonderful programs, and then peruse information at your leisure while in transit, etc.
As for voice activation, my computer can't handle Dragon Naturallyspeaking and it's 500mHz. It lags behind so much that I can't use the program. Not to mention that even after hours of voice training, it still got words mixed up awfully.
I doubt that the Dragonball inside of a Palm can handle voice recognition that well.
Oh - maybe Boone^ was talking about Palm, Inc.
I *thought* this would be a neat idea, but I think I figured out why there's no way that it'll ever work.
ok, it basically lets you dial "into" your palm and speak to it in order to retrieve information.
First of all, how many Palms are connected at this moment? As in, how many Palms have a modem attached which is attached to a phone line or wireless? Maybe leave it in the cradle and you call into your desktop? Nope, because leaving your Palm in the cradle automatically leaves the serial port open which wastes batteries.
And another thing... When would you use this? My guess would be in a situation where you didn't expect that you's need your Palm. And so what are the chances that you'd have actually set it up to receive your call in the first place?
I just don't think this will ever fly. To quote the Daily Show, these two go together like cookies and ass.
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you may quote me
OK, so you forgot your Palm with all of your appointments, todos and phone numbers. You simply call the phone number for the AnyDay Web-based calendar telephone interface and verbally ask for your information. Doh! What's that number again?. I know, it's in my Palm, I'll just look it up. Double-doh! I forgot my Palm! No problem, I just call the AnyDay Web-based calendar telephone interface and get the number...