Well, you have to consider what you really want it for. Conveniently, if what you really want is a palmtop, there's an easy option open to you: buy a palmtop.
Xybernaut, the manufacturer of the $10,000 wearable system from the above Hammacher-Schlemer(sp?) ad, isn't really trying to sell to consumers; their target is big industrial clients. If you're wearing something for your job, who cares what it looks like as long as it gets the job done? And it does. They focus on the "hands-free computing" aspect-- the computer is designed so you can use it no matter where you are without touching it--so they really want speech recognition, which means big processing power, which means Palms are out. But if you're lying upside down under a tank with a bolt in one hand and a wrench in the other you can say "where does this part go?" and it'll show you the schematic-- very handy.
Not so great for a day at the mall, though. The "Wearable Computing" research community tends to focus on the "ubiquitous computing" aspect-- you have a computer with you running all the time wherever you go-- for which palmtops have really captured the consumer market niche even if you have to strech the word "wearable" to include stuffing it in a shirt pocket. The I/O isn't as seamless as an MIT Lizzy or Xybernaut MA IV-- it takes 2 hands to write/type input into a palm computer and the output isn't spoken to you or held continuously in your visual field-- but they *do* fit in a shirt pocket and they're easy on the battery power and software to do all sorts of nifty stuff is readily available.
So far, nobody's really gone after the consumer wearable market in a big way, that I know of. And when they do, the killer app will probably be some sort of "Augmented Reality" toy or tool. Something that genuinely needs all that processing power and the visually intrusive head-mounted display and so on. There are less dorky-looking displays-- I'm still waiting for MicroOptical Corp to release their almost-invisible eyeglass displays to the general market-- but you still have to shell out the bucks for them and that puts a limit on how many people will.
So, I don't think it's just the dorky look or cumbersome heft that's keeping wearable computers off the fashion pages. Some people will put up with anything, as long as it's worth it. But for most people it isn't really worth it-- yet.
For a more pro-wearable view, and some good links, check out Steve Mann's take on the subject-- a prolific wearable pioneer.
More significant is whether a new battery can be hot-swapped in, and whether there's a way to tell while the machine is running how low the battery is (ideally in software, so it can pop up little warnings and generally annoy you until you get the point). Given those things, you can keep 2 or 3 batteries in rotation forever.
Hard to tell from the brief precis in Wired, but it looks like Dragon Systems has come out with speech-grepping software on the open market (demoed at Comdex).
Of course, hooking your laptop up to a radio scanner modified to get the wireless-phone channels and using this software to look for keywords related to, say, Congressional graft, as you stroll through downtown Washington at lunchtime, would be totally illegal. I certainly don't advocate any such thing; it would be wrong.
Might goose the folks putting barriers in the path of widespread crypto adoption, though. And maybe cast the Justice Department's calls for expanded wiretapping powers-- "because technology is eroding away our ability to lawfully intercept communications" -- in a slightly more skeptical light.
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Well, you have to consider what you really want it for. Conveniently, if what you really want is a palmtop, there's an easy option open to you: buy a palmtop.
Xybernaut, the manufacturer of the $10,000 wearable system from the above Hammacher-Schlemer(sp?) ad, isn't really trying to sell to consumers; their target is big industrial clients. If you're wearing something for your job, who cares what it looks like as long as it gets the job done? And it does. They focus on the "hands-free computing" aspect-- the computer is designed so you can use it no matter where you are without touching it--so they really want speech recognition, which means big processing power, which means Palms are out. But if you're lying upside down under a tank with a bolt in one hand and a wrench in the other you can say "where does this part go?" and it'll show you the schematic-- very handy.
Not so great for a day at the mall, though. The "Wearable Computing" research community tends to focus on the "ubiquitous computing" aspect-- you have a computer with you running all the time wherever you go-- for which palmtops have really captured the consumer market niche even if you have to strech the word "wearable" to include stuffing it in a shirt pocket. The I/O isn't as seamless as an MIT Lizzy or Xybernaut MA IV-- it takes 2 hands to write/type input into a palm computer and the output isn't spoken to you or held continuously in your visual field-- but they *do* fit in a shirt pocket and they're easy on the battery power and software to do all sorts of nifty stuff is readily available.
So far, nobody's really gone after the consumer wearable market in a big way, that I know of. And when they do, the killer app will probably be some sort of "Augmented Reality" toy or tool. Something that genuinely needs all that processing power and the visually intrusive head-mounted display and so on. There are less dorky-looking displays-- I'm still waiting for MicroOptical Corp to release their almost-invisible eyeglass displays to the general market-- but you still have to shell out the bucks for them and that puts a limit on how many people will.
So, I don't think it's just the dorky look or cumbersome heft that's keeping wearable computers off the fashion pages. Some people will put up with anything, as long as it's worth it. But for most people it isn't really worth it-- yet.
For a more pro-wearable view, and some good links, check out Steve Mann's take on the subject-- a prolific wearable pioneer.
Well, there's a commercial version made by MicroOptical Corp: http://www.microopticalcorp.com/
Sadly not yet in general production...
More significant is whether a new battery can be hot-swapped in, and whether there's a way to tell while the machine is running how low the battery is (ideally in software, so it can pop up little warnings and generally annoy you until you get the point). Given those things, you can keep 2 or 3 batteries in rotation forever.
Hard to tell from the brief precis in Wired, but it looks like Dragon Systems has come out with speech-grepping software on the open market (demoed at Comdex).
Of course, hooking your laptop up to a radio scanner modified to get the wireless-phone channels and using this software to look for keywords related to, say, Congressional graft, as you stroll through downtown Washington at lunchtime, would be totally illegal. I certainly don't advocate any such thing; it would be wrong.
Might goose the folks putting barriers in the path of widespread crypto adoption, though. And maybe cast the Justice Department's calls for expanded wiretapping powers-- "because technology is eroding away our ability to lawfully intercept communications" -- in a slightly more skeptical light.