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.

Voice recognition

[coreman]

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

Cheap.

[Glytch]

I want them dirt-cheap and mass-produced, like calculators.

All I know...

[ruiner13]

is that as far as memory goes, 640K ought to be enough for anyone.

Oh fer chrissake!

[sgage]

... what you need is a $.49 memo pad and pencil.

Sheesh.

- Steve

feature set

[dasmegabyte]

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.

Feature List

[under_score]

Here's my list:

1. High dpi screen - maybe 400dpi would be acceptable - and a resolution upwards of 1600 x 900 with the ability to use portrait or landscape orientation.
2. Touch screen so that it can be a writing/drawing surface.
3. No more than 0.5 inches thick, but ideally 0.3 or less would be nice.
4. About the same density as paper - hefty but not heavy.
5. Good sound: do some magic with directional speakers so that the sound can be loud but relatively private without headphones. Obviously you would need a pretty intense intelligent sensor system to know where to point the speakers ;-)
6. Extremely good voice and handwriting recognition.
7. High-speed wireless internet access anywhere in the world on a flat rate. This should be a minimum of 1Mbps, but 10Mbps would be better.
8. Strong! Should be able to withstand drops (while turned on) from about 6 feet up onto concrete without physically or logically breaking.
9. As fast as possible :-) Ideally I'd want at least a 16 way Athlon XP yada, yada, no wait! 64 way... you get the idea.
10. 3" CD R/RW is there a 3" DVD format? there should be).
11. As fast as possible :-) (Again!) The graphics subsystem should be at least equivalent to the top of the line 3D NVIDIA card of 5 years in the future!
12. Neural Jack - need I say more?

I want just ONE FEATURE

[The Raven]

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.

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. :P

Re:uh ... why a PDA?

[Thag]

What's wrong with a pocket sized notepad and pencil?

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