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BBC: 2005 Looking Good for Gadgets
wiggles writes "The BBC says, 'The relentless pace of development in the hi-tech world and rampant competition in many of its sectors, particularly among mobile phone firms, all suggests that 2005 is going to be a very good year.' They talk about that (overused?) buzzword 'convergence' and the implications for gadgets in 2005 as we further approach the 'convergence' asymptote. So what 2005 gadgets are Slashdotters looking forward to?" I'm forecasting that 2006 and 2007 are ALSO looking good for gadgets. You heard it here first...
I will need to get my hands on an Apple iPhone (or whatever they will call it)
I will work to elevate you, just enough to bring you down
Control4 looks especially interesting.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
If you live in Korea or Japan you already own the cool gadgets we'll see in 2006 ...
A new car stereo with DAB and MP3 for those long drives to work. My wife got a new phone with camera and kitchen sink. We are three weeks later and she still has to place her first usefull phonecall...
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
The rumor is out there...
I'm looking forward to a PDA that has decent battery life, costs less than $150, has good software and a decent OS installed on it, accepts compact flash cards, is well-supported, is light and thin, and syncs with my Linux machine without having to use duct tape and an extensive knowledge of kernel operations.
If there actually is a PDA out there for lazy farts like me, then I'd be grateful for the tip. If there is no such animal, then I hope some company stops focussing on cramming multimedia stuff into a smaller and smaller box and listens to lazy farts like me who just want a good basic PDA and are Linux users.
convergence (kn-vûrjns) n.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
I am getting one of the new wireless VoIP phones. A friend of mine has one and it is absolutely awesome. As long as you live in the city or an areas where there are many access points it is the best phone you can imagine. Crystal clear calls worldwide with no noticeable delay at minimal bandwith consumption and no cost. WiFi phones rock!
For the camera, it would be nice if it told me in a little overlay, and if it stored the info in the EXIF header to make it easier to categorize pictures.
---
Other wierd ideas like this on my blog :-)
I want the phone I used to have. I bought this Nokia 8600 (8200?) in the year 2000. It was excellent. It was tiny, got great reception and had amazing voice quality. I paid around $150 for it, and it was worth every penny.
I dropped it once and it stopped working. When I went looking for a new phone, I discovered that Nokia had discontinued the 8600 and the only options for new phones were these large monstrosities with cameras, video games, color screens and picture messaging. Absolutely horrible.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm looking forward to the days of wearable computers, but when it comes to a cellphone, all I want is a phone that is small and has good voice quality. The 8200 was the perfect phone. I have no idea why it was discontinued, but all the cell phone makers are playing the same game -- gadgets, gadgets, gadgets. I don't want crazy features, I want something that does its job well, not 15 jobs poorly.
Here's to hoping that in 2005 cell phone makers will go back to producing good cell phones, and not try to include a camera and an atari emulator on every model!
I'd like to see a reasonably priced mini-ITX system with actual horsepower...
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
extern warranty;
main()
{
(void)warranty;
}
I hope the rumors about this little beast are true-- I'd love to get as many family and friends as possible to switch away from Windows, and the existence of a cheap Mac would be a big help.
Once when I was responsible for infrastructure for a major company, my boss the CIO said to me "OK, people are talking about how they'd like the servers to be faster. This is good, because they're no longer saying they'd like the servers to stay up -- they just assume they will."
:)
I don't need a cellphone that takes pictures and plays MP3s, but I'm looking for one; and I don't need an iPod that can store 40Gb of music, but it sure is nice not to have to worry about what to transfer over to the iPod and just put _everything_ there so I can access it.
It's natural, when what we actually _need_ is taken care of, to start looking at the next step -- the things we'd really, really like.
The truth is (well, the truth filtered through my liberal biases) that people need to feel secure in their person, that they need to have a way to make sure they'll have food on their table tomorrow, and a way to exercise a certain sense of autonomy. A roof over their head would be nice too.
While in much of the world the above can't be taken for granted, most of us who read Slashdot already have this. We're probably not going to get shot in the street; we probably don't have to worry about being able to afford a loaf of bread tomorrow. So we start looking at the next, more optional stuff. That's OK -- there's nothing wrong with wanting more out of life than the bare necessities -- as long as we don't confuse "Man, I'd really like to be able to play 'Baby One More Time' as my ringtone" with a need
I think the relentless pace of development in the hi-tech world and rampant competition will be responsible for many premature releases of buggy gadgets in 2005.
E-ink has made a partnership with a company that prints circuits on plastic making e-paper a reality. They go into mass production in 2005 making the paperless office a potential reality.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Here's to hoping that in 2005 cell phone makers will go back to producing good cell phones, and not try to include a camera and an atari emulator on every model!
I travel quite a bit to customer sites, and many of them - particularly organizations with very valuable intellectual property (e.g. trade secrets) - explicitly prohibit cameras of any kind. It is my hope that the major mobile phone vendors recognize the need for nicely-featured phones without cameras for use by consultants and other people working in these facilities.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
A mobile phone with:
MP3 playback, superb sound quality and standard 3.5mm socket.
GPS receiver and the ability to use standard GPS software for smartphones.
A very good keyboard (not spongey), either a standard phone type or qwerty as long as the device doesn't look stupid.
SDIO compatible SD slot
Wifi
Good battery life
Good speakerphone
Expandable memory
Non-volatile storage
I and I suspect most of you over the age of 15 don't need a 'phone' primarilly designed for game play. Though I can't decide which I need more; a device that plays audio CDs and MP3 CDs as well as solid state storage MP3s, or, a phone/PDA combo that can replace an MP3 player as well, as long as the MP3 player doesn't tax the battery much more than the phone how.
I would like better more commonsense PDA functions in the phone such as Palm conduits to Lotus notes and the ability to sync to a web based public calendar. I'd also like a better phone book, one that allows better integration of email addresses.
And as a long time T9 user - back when it was used on Palmpilots as well, I have to say, that dog won't hunt anymore. It's too tedious to use effectively for text messaging and email. I think that Samsung and company are just going to have to bite the bullet on this one and provide a fold up keyboard tht connects to the obscure and seemingly useless data port on on VI660 phone in order for me to effectively use PCS vision services.
And I probably won't get a camera phone unless and until it's a better cheaper and more efficient replacement for a REAL digital camera. And at that, it has to plug directly into a photo printer and unload and print just like the cameras of today.
In five years I want to get rid of my laptop, PDA, phone, MP3 and CD player and use a single device that doesn't cost as much as a car, runs 2 full days on battery power and is 100% backup-able to some storage device on my homeLAN like a network NAS box.
Call me foolish, but I for one am not lusting after convergence. I'd rather have good Bluetooth support. That way, my cell phone, which is good at GSM communications and picture taking, for example, can talk with my iPod which is good at data storage (where all those pictures go). Or my PDA, with it's nice big screen, can download web pages via my cell phone. Or my cell phone can get the next 24 hours worth of appointment information from my PDA, in case I want to travel light for a little while. The scenarios go on and on...
It just seems a little more elegant than carrying one monolithic brick around with you.
- Large, hi-res color display
- big but slim
- touchscreen & navigation buttons
- GSM / GPRS worldphone
- Synch with Multisync
- IR / Bluetooth. Don't really care much about Wifi, I can set up a bridge with my laptop if I really want to extend Wifi for some reason.
- Removable storage (SD / MMC)
- No camera
- No antenna "stub" - they're not really necessary for good reception, other than to make the device look like a phone
Software:So far, I've got my sights set on the next version of the Treo 650 (without a camera, because of work no-camera policies, not that I would miss the camera much anyway). It probably fails on the VNC through SSH thing (unless someone made an integrated secure VNC client already). Also, I should be able to migrate up from my Visor Pro fairly easily, and though I haven't gotten multisync to work yet, I'm pretty happy with using JPilot to sync under Linux (I've never been able to get any of the Win32 tools to restore any of my Visors from backup properly when they get hard reset.)
I've played a bit with an iPaq h5450 from work, and haven't been too happy with it. Of course, it was running PocketPC 2002, but the touchscreen petered out before I could upgrade it to PocketPC 2003, and it costs $200 to replace (no thank you). I'm currently running GPE 2.5 on it (since xstroke isn't as picky as WinCE and OPIE about the touchscreen not working right), but GPE isn't quite as usable as OPIE. I've even gone through the lengths of installing a Debian ARM distro on a 1GB compactflash so I could run mozilla on it. While all that is interesting, I don't really use it for more than viewing Plucker pages at the moment :P
PalmOS still seems to have more genuinely useful software than WinCE and even Linux on handhelds at the moment, so I'm not too afraid of going the Treo route... it does break my long-standing "no devices more than $200 in my pocket" rule, but if there's anything "convergence" would do for me, it would be to justify replacing 2-3 $200 devices so I can bend this rule a bit :>
Unfortunately, Apple, the company with some of the best pen technology and hardware engineering capabilities steadfastly refuses to make a successor to a product which was an excellent ebook reader (and personal digital assistant --- inaugurating the term) --- unfortunately the only pen computing solutions Apple offers are Macs w/ Wacom graphic tablets (I mislike working on one surface and watching what happens on another, and gave up on schlepping a graphics tablet and a laptop around when I got my NCR-3125) or a PowerMac w/ a Wacom Cintiq --- that last is a pretty cool (albeit expensive) solution, but it's uncommon enough not much software specifically takes advantage of it (Alias' Sketchbook was ported to Mac OS X after many requests). Contrast this w/ the situation for Windows Tablet PCs and look at http://www.ambientdesign.com/artrage.html &c.
.pdf version (why aren't .pdfs as document previews in bundles a standard for apps these days?) and allowed one to do basic annotation and mark up it'd still be fabulously useful (can you say ebooks? importing annotations from Acrobat and applying them as revisions in Word? extending this functionality to support all Cocoa apps?)
.html versions --- port Safari).
Think of it as an extension to the iPod line --- the iPod lets one carry all of one's music (as a backup too) and modify the order it plays in --- the iPod Photo adds all of one's images to that --- how about a further upscale unit to allow one to carry all of one's documents?
Even if it did nothing but display a
If it's set up to be a Macintosh computer as well, being able to run Mac applications is a huge benison is just icing on the cake, but just basic use (calendaring / scheduling, note-taking, document annotation) in situations where a laptop is inappropriate / inconvenient (meetings, interviews, while walking about), and having the (portable!) equivalent to a Wacom Cintiq whet it's attached to one's Macintosh (look at the program Maxivista for an example of how this could work) is certainly worthwhile.
And of course, it'd be nice to replace my Newton which I still use for contact management (synch w/ iCal and AddressBook.app), note-taking (port the Newton user interface and Notepad) and of course, reading some ebooks (incl.
William
(whose Stylistic has music, hundreds of ebooks, a complete graphic design portfolio _and_ all the tools necessary to update and work on said portfolio --- see http://members.aol.com/willadams/portfolio.html --- including a copy of TeX, LyX &c.)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Too often the cell companies design with the "Phone Company" mindset; i.e. they design a totally closed platform that they control so they can extract revenue from you. Yes the gadget can do cool ringtones, take pictures and play games.... at a per use charge for each.
If it isn't an open platform you can count me out. By open I don't mean it has to run Linux, but if I can't get a devel kit at little (use the pricing and availibility for the official Palm devkit as an example) or no cost it isn't open. If I can't download apps from sourceforge and install them without the vendor's blessing it isn't open. Notice that even WinCE is open by this definition.
Yes I understand that some parts of a cellphone's firmware must be unchangable for reasons that are obvious to anyone with an understanding of how things work, but the rest should be as open as possible, and standardized across multiple product lines and vendors is a big plus.
Democrat delenda est