The company I work for in Japan has been moving slowly forward on this idea for a long time now - a PDA for tourists that provides specific and useful location-based information and services. Of course, it's a lot easier when you don't have to turn a profit, grumble grumble.
Anyway, it seems like a really good idea that's hobbled in a few dreadful ways:
1) the PDA can act as a phone, but only for outgoing domestic calls, and it seems as if it's time-limited (2 hours??). I'm guessing that it might be free phone service, so they're trying to cut down on possible over-use, but not allowing incoming calls is a huge problem.
2) no GPS. If it's going to provide useful information, it's got to know where it is at any time, because chances are good that the user won't... So GPS is essential, and enables a huge range of other applications, not least of which is live directions.
Other than these two problems, it seems great, and even has a nicely put-together software package. Speech recognition would be the next step, or at least a simple kanji translation program (so that, for example, if you were trying to understand a waiter, you could pass him the PDA and have him write on the screen, then the PDA would translate that to English - both of these functions that are already present in the Zaurus models sold in Japan.
Don't know if it'll display properly, but the PDF here looks like they'll be using Windows-based PDAs. Wonder how they got the voice recognition going?
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Oh, and we were going to do it with Sony Clies, not Windows...ah, there's nothing like what could have been, is there?
The company I work for in Japan has been moving slowly forward on this idea for a long time now - a PDA for tourists that provides specific and useful location-based information and services. Of course, it's a lot easier when you don't have to turn a profit, grumble grumble.
Anyway, it seems like a really good idea that's hobbled in a few dreadful ways:
1) the PDA can act as a phone, but only for outgoing domestic calls, and it seems as if it's time-limited (2 hours??). I'm guessing that it might be free phone service, so they're trying to cut down on possible over-use, but not allowing incoming calls is a huge problem.
2) no GPS. If it's going to provide useful information, it's got to know where it is at any time, because chances are good that the user won't... So GPS is essential, and enables a huge range of other applications, not least of which is live directions.
Other than these two problems, it seems great, and even has a nicely put-together software package. Speech recognition would be the next step, or at least a simple kanji translation program (so that, for example, if you were trying to understand a waiter, you could pass him the PDA and have him write on the screen, then the PDA would translate that to English - both of these functions that are already present in the Zaurus models sold in Japan.
I seem to remember an article about exactly that last year - but it was still in the research phase. Ah, here's something...
Don't know if it'll display properly, but the PDF here looks like they'll be using Windows-based PDAs. Wonder how they got the voice recognition going?