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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?
The first company to add voice recognition to a PDA to allow hands free operation, will grab huge marketshare. This will be the killer app of the PDA
You clearly stated that your needs where to keep track of appointments and write notes. You could probably also use the contacts information. The Visor and Palm do all of these tasks exceptionally.
Why don't you just say what you really want? A GameBoy Advance combined with a Palm, combined with a cell phone with unlimited wireless service for $5/month.
This is another BS Ask Slashdot, asked simply to get the poster's name on the front page. Cliff you are a screw-up.
P.S. If you are really forgetting appointments 24 hours after the fact, a PDA will only weaken your memory by making you even more lazy.
That's it.
1;
Add to this "I want them to all use the same data format, so I can easily transfer my address book from one to another when I decide I need a new one."
Even if the el cheapo ones cost $5 at your local drugstore, it's useless unless it's easy to move data into and out of it. Nothing sucks worse than building up your data for six months and then getting a PDA with a completely different data format as a gift.
this is a sig.
1) Small or integrated power cable. This is much more important than battery life. If you can build in a transformer that's so small i'm not embarassed to unwind it, there's really no need for battery life above 6 hours. I'm always at least 4 hours from a wall outlet or cigarette lighter.
:)
2) Off-processor or otherwise more efficient multimedia processing. This would allow for a slower, cooler CPU to conserve batery life when not playing mp3s, movies or fancy shmancy games.
3) Full access to the hardware via a standardized API (either CE, Pocket PC or PocketLinux).
4) A microphone jack. Give me a mic jack and a wireless CF card with the ability to log into a GSM cell system and i've already got my cell phone.
5) Seperate peripheral and memory slots. The new Toshiba unit goes a step further than this, with seperate "Secure" digital memory and compactflash peripheral slots, as well as a built in 802.11b slot. That's what I want.
6) Built in "cradle." That is, I'd like a USB / firewire port on the unit and a USB slot on the machine, so that I can use quality, inexpensive USB cable and not the expensive proprietary stuff. If I could draw power from the line to charge up, it's an added plus.
7) 802.11b. Then I won't need a cradle at all
For my money, that new Tosh Pocket PC unit is close to perfect. It may offend you "pad & pencil" palm folks and you linux lovers to hear this, but the CE OS is very mature, has a ton of apps, is easy to develop for without heavy licensing costs (even if it is for the evil empire), and has so many genuine choices on the market, eg machines with very different hardware for people with different uses.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Work as a cell phone
Wireless Internet / Email access
Simple database to track lists
Encrypted data vault for PIN's
Synchronize data with computer
USB 2.0 port
Smart Memory port that will use generic SmartMedia
How about a PCMCIA port?
Infrared
Security feature that can't be bypassed with factory tools
A longer stylus. Have two pieces that screw togethor and it would fit
A belt clip, I don't always have a coat to put it in
A vibrate feature for alarms and incoming calls
Color! It's not a grayscale world
Headphone jack for MP3's.
Why do I feel like you work for Zaurus?
And when he says longer battery life... We mean it. 8 hours... Why not 16? Why bot 24? Why not 72? Why not 100? Yes, we can recharge batteries. Do we want to recharge it every day? NO. Do we want to do it often? NO. Once a week is about right.
The ability to tell it something, voiced, and have it remind me about it later. I want to be able to add timer/alarm based voice recordings. It does not need to parse the entire language... just certain key words.
:P
Remind me to walk the dog every day at 6pm.
REMIND ME TO (intro keyword, start listening)
"walk the dog" recorded verbatim, played back when the timer goes off.
EVERY DAY AT 6PM (parsed into an alarm)
It should be able to handle many kinds of timers and alarms:
Remind me to go home you workaholic every weekday at 6pm.
Remind me to check for a new mozilla version next Tuesday.
Remind me to buy mom a birthday card on September 1st.
Remind me to call my brother every Easter.
Remind me to check the pizza in 10 minutes.
Remind me to check my heart rate every 5 minutes for one hour.
That's all I want. I could care less about every other feature on a stupid PDA... I do not use them. All I need is someting to remind me of things, quickly and easily. A small LCD screen to review reminders, or possibly an IR port (or bluetooth) instead and some PC software.
It would not need to parse quickly... it could take up to a minute to process the speech. It could confirm that it has successfully added by beeping or vibrating for a second... confused parsing or incorrect parsing would cause it to beep or vibrate several times to get your attention.
Power needs would be quite low... the thing could probably go weeks or months on a single charge. I have a Casio Voice-Recording watch that I have not had to change batteries for yet, and it's over a year and a half old. Only parsing a new recording would tax its batteries.
That is my killer feature. When something can do that for me, I will be on it in a hot second. And if someone patents it and sits on it, I'm gonna be suing for prior art, the b**ches.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Solution: dirt cheap and wireless. Store your data on the server. PDA craps out while you're walking down the street? Toss it in the trash, walk into the convenience store, buy a new one, continue where you left off.
Most pieces of technology reach a stage where they're "about right," become commodity items, and stagnate. OK, they never stagnate completely, but the differences between a 1957 Chevy and a 2002 Toyota Corolla--heck, even a Prius--are pretty darn incremental. They both have automatic transmission, you put gas in 'em, turn the key to start them, and drive 70 mph on the Interstate with them. You did it in 1957 just the way you do it now. Sure, now you fasten your seatbelt, get 35 mpg, and you never need to replace the vibrator in the car radio. (Don't snicker at that, you ignorant young whippersnapper. How ELSE did you think you'd generate the B voltage for the vacuum tubes?).
Same thing with a PDA. What things do I want that I don't have already? Boring things. Incremental things. Cheaper, clearer, better screen, yadda yadda yadda. My personal shtick is a good eBook reader... but what I'm saying is, PDA's are OK. They've figured it out. A Palm is great for addresses, phone numbers, etc. Just like a four-function calculator is great for adding up a few numbers.
Yes, I've seen calculators built into pens, into watches, calculators that graph equations, etc. but the classic four-function calculator is FINISHED--not in the sense of "dead," in the sense of COMPLETE.
And the PDA is "finished," too. It has a pretty high gloss on it already, in fact, although I'm sure they'll manage to polish it some more in the coming decades.
But the future is a $10 PDA that's about the same size, the same weight, and has about the same feature set as today's $100 Palm (or yesterday's $400 Palm)--or today's $30 cheapo PDA knockoff.
The $400 Palm that makes coffee, walks the dog, is woven into your handkerchief, and plays realtime multiplayer Internet games ain't gonna happen.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
A pad of paper doesn't beep an alarm before the event you forgot about happens.
Worse, once you fill up the pad of paper, you either leave it at home, where you no longer have access to the information it contains, or carry around two pads of paper. Either way you wind up with scads of paper notepads lying around. I know: that's what I used to do before I bought a Palm. You will never fill up a current-model Palm with your notes and addresses and schedule. I never came close to filling up my original 1 MB Pilot, and current machines start at 8 MB. Plus, when the time comes to copy those notes into some other app, they're already there on your computer.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.