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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Katherine Derbyshire who wrote (50555)	8/15/2001 11:37:40 AM
From: mitch-c	Respond to of 70976

OT - uber-PDA My major complaint with the PDA world is that the durn thing has to be small enough to carry easily, yet large enough to use with fat fingers. Flexible/wearable displays (HUD's?) and input devices (keyboards? twiddlers?) would alleviate that ... as would "universal" wireless docking. Just as you can program your garage door opener to receive a coded signal from several different clackers, you should be able to "key" a PDA to different input stations - car, desk, home, etc. (an encrypted MAC address or IPv6 address would do it.) Essentially, you would just carry the "brains" of the thing, and use different keyboard/display combos as needed. (I'd retain a touchpad for stand-alone use.) Since we're talking "brains," and that's the component shrinking faster than Moore's Law, I think this'll converge fairly soon. Copper traces help - lower wire resistance, lower power, better battery life. Cost/benefit - The sad part about the digital world is that you always seem to get better utility, but at a constant price (Machrone's Law). I can't count the number of $40 cell plans around here with more and more minutes - but the $30 plans are skimpy, and the $20 plans are a joke. Instead of lowering the price on a constant amount of minutes, the cell companies pile in more (off-peak) minutes and keep the price the same. (In a prior life, I wore a pistol belt/suspender combination with 2 quarts of water (3 lb), a poncho (1 lb), a pistol and holster (5 lb), ammo pouches (1 lb), and assorted other ash 'n trash. I figure the load came out to about 12 lb, and I was traveling light! (My tank kept the heavy rucksack and duffle bag.) So, yeah, your average (civilian) road warrior doesn't want to lug around a carpenter's belt full of gadgetry.) So, when this hypothetical uber-PDA rolls out, it'll probably cost and weigh about the same as today's Palm V (marketing guys like to do that), but with the enhanced features described. - Mitch