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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?
(just summarizing here)
1] Longer battery life
2] An actual keyboard (or a stylus that works)
3] Upgrade-able software
4] Lots, LOTS of memory
5] Ofcourse, the ability to run in a Beowulf cluster...
Which is why i bought a Psion series 5. All the features the others have and a truly usable keyboard.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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
I have seen too man scratched screens over the years. I would like to see some kind of integrated, and replacable, screen protector.
What do you know I wrote a novel
I want them dirt-cheap and mass-produced, like calculators.
I want one of those 3d girls.
and force feedback
is that as far as memory goes, 640K ought to be enough for anyone.
today is spelling optional day.
... what you need is a $.49 memo pad and pencil.
Sheesh.
- Steve
linux pda.
... should really be a hand-held computer.
640x480 screen, extensible (by yanking it out) to 800x640
Integrated pinhole camera
Runs Linux (duh), w/compile-on-PDA
64 megs operational memory, as-much-as-it-can-take storage memory
Grafitti or similar writing system, with add-on keyboard (a la GoType)
IrDA access
Extension capability via high-speed, low pinout interfaces (more than one).
Battery lasts for about three weeks under heavy usage.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
City-wide flat-rate wireless internet access with real web browsing at a 640x480 minimum resolution.
There is so much I could do if I had a web browser in my pocket all the time, and I wasn't nickled and dimed for using it.
- At least a GB of nonvolatile memory (why is it that my digital camera can accept a microdrive but most PDAs can't?)
- 802.11
- Firewire
- MP3 player
- Color screen with MPEG-4 player
- Microphone for voice recording to MP3, preferably with voice recognition but could be downloaded to desktop PC for VR later.
- Wireless short text messaging/email with ability to use its wireless modem from a computer when I need a bigger screen
- Microsloth-free
I guess what I'm looking for is the bastard child of a Newton and an iPod with a few extra bells and whistles.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.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
if you had one of those I'd be taking shots at you....wtf would it need to be bullet proof?
I'd shoot you in the foot or something to steal it
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!
I enter data, it gets synced (transparently) over the Internet-- first hop wireless-- to my server. Do it through my cellular carrier, I don't care. I read data, it gets cached locally unless it's updated. But there's no need to cache everything locally, so don't load my PDA up with expensive memory.
Do this, make it reliable, and make it cost less than $100, and I'll probably buy a couple and just leave them where I might need them-- one at work, one in the car, one at home.
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.
I want it to do that Ding-dong, ding-dong... Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! Bong! ... ("Hey, is it five already?") Surely this would not be hard to program but I can't find one out there.
I bought the rights to this technology and had it suppressed. Why? Because for 90% of its users, it would be "Hey, is it half-way through the movie already?"
The next phase of my plan is to make it so that the cellphone that makes noise costs $90 more than the vibrating cellphone. Then I will make it so that all car alarms immediately summon the police. Consumers will perceive this as a security feature and buy it in droves, but they will soon discover that the police, overworked and irritated, will summarily execute anybody who can't work their car alarm, which is apparently almost everybody.
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.
I play Nerd-Folk!