Ideal PDA Feature Wishlist?

RichiP asks: "My memory is so poor I forget friends' birthdays and appointments I made a day ago. I sometimes have an idea I want to jot down but that I end up forgetting when I finally come upon pen & paper. To help myself, I was thinking of purchasing one of those integrated PDA and cellphone devices (first the Handspring Treo then another by Samsung), but I've always felt that these devices were still far from ideal. I was wondering if the Slashdot community would share their wishlist of features for what they believe would be the ideal Personal Digital Assistant. Features for input, processing and output are all welcome. Perhaps the device I want may be years from becoming commercial. Given the right ideas from input from others, I might be able to come up with my own device or start an open project geared towards it." Even if you do feel that PDAs have a limited lifespan, if you had a chance to add a feature to a PDA (especially if you felt it would increase the lifespan of the PDA), what would it be?

Comments

A decent keyboard

[Moderation abuser]

Which is why i bought a Psion series 5. All the features the others have and a truly usable keyboard.

Newton 2.0 handwriting was AWESOME!

[GlenRaphael]

When people refer to great handwriting recognition on the Newton, they are talking about the second-generation Newton OS. Newton OS 2.0 shipped with the MessagePad 130. NewtonOS 2.1( that shipped on the MessagePad 2000) had even better recognition which I'm pretty sure no other PDA has yet managed to approach or surpass.

Of course, I'm a bit biased in that I tested the 2.0 recognition engine.

Looking at the references you give, most of them only criticize recognition on the earliest models, The sole exception is the document Handwriting Tips for Newton Power Users which was a guide to how to get the best possible recognition out of OS 2.0. As the person who anonymously wrote the bulk of that guide, I'd like to say that it was not my intention to slam the general quality of 2.0 recognition. Newton handwriting recognition rocked!

My hope is that when the ARM-based PalmOS devices come out, Sony will release a Clie that has decent word-based recognition. Newton's incredible achievement wasn't just that they got get great recognition but that they did it with such a small memory footprint. Given how much cheaper ROM and RAM are today, I wouldn't be surprised to see a Palm or WinCE device with decent recognition some time in the next few years.