The Dream Handheld

Reader samjam sent in an interesting piece about his dream handheld PC, sort of a cross between a subnotebook and a wireless web pad, with the kitchen sink thrown in. Mmmmm, light-emitting polymers. I can't decide if this kind of thing is right around the corner or just a fantasy - after all, normal notebook computers sell, and at a nice high premium - and web pads are less than successful - why would anyone spend the money to develop a device like this? samjam writes: "My dream handheld is not available though some things come close. The technology is becoming available.

Though it may take a few months, here is what I would put together if I had the chance. Including Bluetooth, IButtons, solar panels and light emitting polymer screens...

For links to other linux handhelds, try linuxdevices.com.

My ideal handheld is the size of an A4 pad of paper, so I have to hold it on my left forearm with the fingers of my left hand curled over the end. A4 gives me plenty of screen space for watching real TV, reading real books, writing real emails, browsing real web pages and doing some real showing off.

The front cover is a solar panel, but I can't decide if the cells should be on the inside or the outside to help charge it while I use it or while I'm not using it. Hard one that.

The screen is not heavy-breakable LCD but LEP (brief technical primer, more on Google) or perhaps Xerox Electronic Paper seemingly available under the name Gyricon, pictures here and slight details here.

The choice of processor doesn't bother me much; I'd like to think there are many versions available of my handheld by many manufacturers (to drive the price down) and so many processors will be available but let's pretend the first release will run on a Transmeta just to keep excitement running high.

60 GB or so should be plenty of disk space, 2.5" IDE to keep weight down.

Input via stylus or sticky finger of course, with support for Graffiti, as used on the Palm and many others, also Quickwriting as featured on Slashdot as well as regular handwriting recognition (take your pick) and other pluggable input modules with popup keyboard for those times when you just can't manage to input a tilde (~) or backtick (`) properly.

Connectivity will be provided via a multitide of USB ports (where real keyboards can be plugged), Bluetooth (useless link) in action (good link), wireless ethernet as well as perhaps as many as 4 PCMCIA slots for things that change a lot like GPRS adaptors &c, or radio and TV tuner cards. Yeah! Why not add some Compact Flash while I'm at it? And boring 100 base T ethernet.

In fact I'm going to use the mobile phone card, along with my sound system to make the whole thing into a mobile phone for voice, not just data access. Talking of phones, the built in web cam can be used for video conferencing with (for example) Gnophone.

Better stick some firewire ports on there, too, for good measure, along with a few IRDA ports pointing in a few different directions for those more subversive inter-classroom networks as well as controlling my grannies telly to show off. And talking to my old non-bluetooth mobile which I can't afford to upgrade cos I spent it all on my handheld.

It will have integrated Ibutton support for security and authentification, maybe even built into the BIOS.

What more do I need? Oh yes, an Operating System. Pick your own.

I shall be running Linux with Ximian Gnome because it looks cool (and Bill Gates was nearly right, eye candy counts for a lot if only not to distract you by means of ugliness). I will be running redhat because I find up2date (or redhat channels of RedCarpet) invaluable effort-free way to remove those exploits, and I will finally get round to playing with Rebol.

The first thing I will need to develop is some network scavenging software to grab internet connectivity where it can for syncing imap folders and news, updating "offline web pages" [yikes! MS concept there]. Code to hi-jack available SMTP relays (*cough*). Does this smell a bit like Jini or something like it? I'll need to register my changing location for Gnophone so callers can find me. Perhaps the first thing for company visitors in the future will be to checkin their Ideal Handheld to the company network.

I will load all my favourite books into it as well as the entire classical Mormon works, copies of conference talks Doctrines of Salvation, Journal of Discourses etc, along with the Bible, Book of Mormon, and all of Project Gutenberg.

What will you do with yours? Have I missed any gizmos out? Or gadgets even?"

Comments

A4 size?

[bogado]

This size is good for using the handheld, with plenty of screen space and etc.But when you are not using it it would be a nigthmare. Where would you put it? Shure you you could keep a special pupose bag, much like the ones for laptop computers. But then it would be a laptop computer, not a handheld.

I think that a true hand held have to fit your pocket, this way you could take it wherever you go.

How is this different from a notebook?

[ankit]

Thys would be a good description of a dream notebook.. not a handheld.

I would like a handheld that I can keep in my
pocket, and carry in my backpack easily. I dont really care much for the screen size. An A4 size is not really practical, and a smaller size would be suitable for must purposes.

This doesnt mean the idea is not good. It is a great idea for a notebook. A notebook without a keyboard... and the option for connection a standard keyboard. the keyboard is rarely used for web surfing, reading mail, and most day to day work. The only use of a keyboard is, well... coding. So, when you need the thing for coding, just carry a little keyboard along :)

my version

[macpeep]

Nice.. A little too big for my taste tho. Even the Sony Picturebook is smaller - and that's a notebook, not a "handheld" really.

Here's my version:

A5 sized (half of the article describes), screen only with virtual keyboard and touch screen with a GOOD metallic stylus (obviously softer material for the tip). WLAN, Bluetooth, GPRS and tri-band GSM (900, 1800 and 1900 MHz) plus HSCSD are all a must in my dream handheld, but I'll add to this that the antennas for all must be internal. Also, for the times when no wireless connectivity is available, a normal phone and LAN jack would be needed. Basically, as you can see, connectivity is priority #1.

Moving along, I'd throw out your hard drive and replace it with a set of compact flash slots - say 4 of them and let's say two PC card slots. In those, you could put hard drive's (IBM microdrives in the CF slots and higher capacity drives in the PC card slots). You could also slam in 4 1GB CF cards in those for a total of 4GB. This is less than the hard drive in the article, but remember that this is a *handheld* and that it has net connectivity so it can use a drive somewhere else, like on a file server.

The device would have at least 64MB of RAM and a Strong ARM CPU. If battery was no issue, I'd consider a Transmeta CPU instead but the ARM based CPU should be better for a device like this.

TFT is fine for me. I saw some TOTALLY kick ass EL-screens on an exhibition in Tokyo last month tho. Maybe one of those.. I'd have to look more closely at the power consumption cause I'd like to get at least 24 hour battery life from this thing.

The OS would sit in ROM. What the OS would be is a little unclear to me. You can forget Palm OS right away. Pocket PC (especially 2002) is *great* on iPAQ type devices but this one would be larger than that. Windows CE, which Pocket PC builds on, is quite nice and stable too, contrary to what you would normally hear on Slashdot. EPOC is a bitch to code for, so I think I'd skip that. For a device like this, I'd pick Linux, I think, but the GUI would have to be something custom made especially for this device because I haven't found any existing Linux GUI to be good for handhelds yet.. :/

Speaking of GUI.. It would *NOT* be frame based. ;)

Hello?

[not-quite-rite]

2.5" IDE to keep weight down

WTF?

For god sakes you just included some very nice screen kit, but then asked for a 2.5" hard drive?

How is the size of an A4 piece of paper easy to carry? That is going to be at least the thickness of 2.5"(see annoyance above).
What he has described offers a laptop without a proper keyboard. It hasn't stopped my need to carry a phone, a palm, my wallet, keys etc.

Do you own a PDA let alone a HPC?
How much do you carry around with you?
At times I carry my Palm, 2 phones, wallet and keys. Why would I want to carry around any more crap, in particular a retarded laptop?

Ok stop. Relax. Breathe. Take pills.

The rant has subsided...

For giants only

[Camelot]

My ideal handheld is the size of an A4 pad of paper

Big hand have you.

My own dream

[Salamander]

You're basically confusing two concepts here: handheld and notebook. The requirements are different. A notebook should be very nearly equivalent functionally to a middling or slightly wimpy desktop, with weight measured in pounds and battery life in hours. A handheld needs to be much more extremely portable, with weight in ounces and battery life in weeks. The portability/power requirements basically dictate that a certain amount of desktop-equivalent functionality be sacrificed. That said, here are some of my ideas about what would be truly ideal for each, starting with the notebook (which more closely matches your description):

• Size and display: A4 is a good display size, but a little too big for easy transportation when not in use. Fortunately, with a flexible medium such as LEP you could have both. Basically the screen could be like those portable projection screens that you roll up when not in use.
• Power: solar might be nice, but you're typically not going to get that much out of it. Instead of a battery, though, use tiny methane fuel cells.
• Processor: something like a Transmeta would be a good fit.
• Connectivity: putting USB (including, I presume, USB2) and Firewire and Bluetooth and 802.11b (what about 802.11a) makes the base system too complex. Put one low-end (USB1) and one high-end (Firewire) interconnect on board, then provide four or more PCMCIA/CF slots so the user can customize the rest to suit their needs.

For the true handheld, things look a little different:

• Size and display: it needs to be smaller (more portable) than today's handhelds, not larger, and the display needs to be instantly accessible without unrolling a screen. E-Ink is a good fit here, especially because it would be nice to have your agenda or to-do list still visible at a glance even while consuming zero power. The limit on screen resolution is the combination of the unit's physical size and the human eye; the dots can only be so small, so only so many of them can fit. I'd say that anything more than 320x320 is pushing the boundaries of usefulness.
• Power: solar is definitely not going to get you anywhere. Fortunately, those methane fuel cells are small enough even for a PDA.
• Processor: even a Crusoe might suck too much juice. I'd go with a super-low-power asynchronous-logic chip.
• Connectivity: very limited options here. There's room for one CF card, but not two. The best hope is that they'll be able to fit connectivity logic onto something more like MMC so you can have more than one expansion slot.

One could well argue that we should be getting away from the idea of "handhelds" anyway. Maybe we should be thinking more in terms of an eyeglass-mounted virtual display (pick a resolution and color depth) connected via short-range wireless to a belt- or shoe-mounted CPU unit.

The one thing I haven't really talked about is storage. That's because I have some definitely "out there" views on that subject. Basically I don't think there's going to be a reason to have a lot of permanent storage in the user-facing device. Instead, the storage will be in the network - encrypted, fully distributed, accessed securely via our ever-improving network connectivity options. Sure, there'd be local storage, but only enough to boot and to serve as a cache of the data which still "lives" in the network. A modest amount of FMRAM should be entirely sufficient, with no need for rotating media and the costs - power, noise, mechanical fragility - associated with them. Maybe if you wanted to take your PDA to Antarctica you'd need something different, but before long the distributed-storage model should work anywhere in the civilized world.

Yes, I know some people hate the idea of data-less devices. Generally this is for one of several outdated reasons:

• Diskless workstations were deployed at a time in the past when the network technology was really not adequate to support the same user experience that you'd get with a local disk.
• To make things worse, a lot of diskless-workstation deployments were horribly underprovisioned, with insufficient servers and switching infrastructure.
• Diskless operation used to imply ceding control of your data (and access to it) to someone else. With modern distributed-system technology that no longer needs to be the case; you can store your data on someone else's hardware, and access it via a third party's communications infrastructure, without giving up any control or privacy.

In short, none of these objections really apply any more. With the right technology and the right SLAs in place, there'd be no compelling reason to have a local disk.