My dream PDA
Sep. 4th, 2006 08:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenI am enjoying playing with my new netBook, battered old thing that it is, and I can see it being an excellent mobile writing tool. It's still far from state of the art, though, and I was recently asked on CIX what I'd want out of my ideal PDA-type device, given a clean sheet to design it.
Myself, for a PDA, I want a C21 Psion 5. It should be the same size, shape and so on as a Psion 5mx, and ideally, it'd have at least a comparable battery life as well. (Which is to say, about a month of use - 30-40h or more.) The battery can be a rechargeable thing as long as in a push I can replace it with a couple of AA cells when I'm out on the road.
I still want an ARM chip, but I want a screaming fast one - at least 600-800MHz and maybe even one of the rumoured new dual-core 1.2GHz ones. I want shedloads of RAM - 128MB or so. I want to keep the CF slot and supplement it with at least one SD slot, capable of taking MMC and SDIO cards. Perhaps one CF, one SDIO, and one miniSD or something for pure storage.
I want a headphone socket & decent stereo sound. I want a colour LCD, perhaps a widescreen one - I think something like 800x480 is probably possible in that form factor these days. I want Bluetooth onboard and USB instead of serial comms, but I want to keep IRDA.
And that's about it. It should still run EPOC or the latest Symbian equivalent, with an option on Linux. If it runs Symbian I want access to my old apps. I'd also like a bundled 8086 emulator - I'm not fussed about DOS but I could still, today, use access to EPOC16 apps from my old Series 3 machines.
I'd also quite like an updated netBook, too. A power-user version, subnotebook sized but super-skinny and lightweight, with all-solid-state storage and lots of it - I reckon 16GB is doable these days. It should have USB2 host sockets and Firewire too, and onboard Ethernet and Wifi. With a Cardbus slot, there'd be the option of using an iPod-type PCMCIA hard disk, for 60GB or so of fairly battery-thrifty storage. But without this, this would be a decently-powerful notebook PC with a battery life of a day or 2 - I'd hope for at least 12h and preferably twice that. I don't give a monkey's that it wouldn't run Windows. Symbian would do, with a little work; with none to speak of, Linux or RISC OS would be delightful. Big screen - like a 10" or something TFT, say 1280x800 or something like that. Needs basic 2D acceleration, nothing more.
I find a keyboardless PDA is a bit of a toy, myself, and rather useless and inflexible compared to a Psion. For that role, I'd be reasonably happy with a tweak of my Nokia 7710, but with a phone-type numeric keypad. I'd put the keys down either side of the screen, like a Siemens SX-1. I'd make it symmetrical, so it worked in portrait mode as well as landscape. I'd replace the internal MMC slot with an externally-accessible SDIO slot, so that I could add Wifi, and add in IRDA and a standard headphone socket. I'd supplement that single socket with an RSMMC or similar miniature memory slot, so that I could add Wifi /and/ additional storage at the same time.
(EDIT: Actually, while I'm dreaming, a slide-out keyboard in the style of the HTC Wizard would be lovely, too. I've played with the clamshell-type Qtek 9000, as owned by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dougs amongst others, and the Zaurus SL-C3000, but they're just too small and fiddly. I can't write on one - the keyboard's too small to type on and the VGA screen is so tiny that you can't use the full resolution. 80 column text comes out at about 4 points or something, only readable at nosetip-range. Fun, clever, useless, to me at least.)
Nothing here's SF. It's all existing real-world tech & these are all features from existing products, just combined into new ones. Shouldn't be eye-wateringly expensive, either.
What would you want out of a pocket computer?
Myself, for a PDA, I want a C21 Psion 5. It should be the same size, shape and so on as a Psion 5mx, and ideally, it'd have at least a comparable battery life as well. (Which is to say, about a month of use - 30-40h or more.) The battery can be a rechargeable thing as long as in a push I can replace it with a couple of AA cells when I'm out on the road.
I still want an ARM chip, but I want a screaming fast one - at least 600-800MHz and maybe even one of the rumoured new dual-core 1.2GHz ones. I want shedloads of RAM - 128MB or so. I want to keep the CF slot and supplement it with at least one SD slot, capable of taking MMC and SDIO cards. Perhaps one CF, one SDIO, and one miniSD or something for pure storage.
I want a headphone socket & decent stereo sound. I want a colour LCD, perhaps a widescreen one - I think something like 800x480 is probably possible in that form factor these days. I want Bluetooth onboard and USB instead of serial comms, but I want to keep IRDA.
And that's about it. It should still run EPOC or the latest Symbian equivalent, with an option on Linux. If it runs Symbian I want access to my old apps. I'd also like a bundled 8086 emulator - I'm not fussed about DOS but I could still, today, use access to EPOC16 apps from my old Series 3 machines.
I'd also quite like an updated netBook, too. A power-user version, subnotebook sized but super-skinny and lightweight, with all-solid-state storage and lots of it - I reckon 16GB is doable these days. It should have USB2 host sockets and Firewire too, and onboard Ethernet and Wifi. With a Cardbus slot, there'd be the option of using an iPod-type PCMCIA hard disk, for 60GB or so of fairly battery-thrifty storage. But without this, this would be a decently-powerful notebook PC with a battery life of a day or 2 - I'd hope for at least 12h and preferably twice that. I don't give a monkey's that it wouldn't run Windows. Symbian would do, with a little work; with none to speak of, Linux or RISC OS would be delightful. Big screen - like a 10" or something TFT, say 1280x800 or something like that. Needs basic 2D acceleration, nothing more.
I find a keyboardless PDA is a bit of a toy, myself, and rather useless and inflexible compared to a Psion. For that role, I'd be reasonably happy with a tweak of my Nokia 7710, but with a phone-type numeric keypad. I'd put the keys down either side of the screen, like a Siemens SX-1. I'd make it symmetrical, so it worked in portrait mode as well as landscape. I'd replace the internal MMC slot with an externally-accessible SDIO slot, so that I could add Wifi, and add in IRDA and a standard headphone socket. I'd supplement that single socket with an RSMMC or similar miniature memory slot, so that I could add Wifi /and/ additional storage at the same time.
(EDIT: Actually, while I'm dreaming, a slide-out keyboard in the style of the HTC Wizard would be lovely, too. I've played with the clamshell-type Qtek 9000, as owned by
dougs amongst others, and the Zaurus SL-C3000, but they're just too small and fiddly. I can't write on one - the keyboard's too small to type on and the VGA screen is so tiny that you can't use the full resolution. 80 column text comes out at about 4 points or something, only readable at nosetip-range. Fun, clever, useless, to me at least.)Nothing here's SF. It's all existing real-world tech & these are all features from existing products, just combined into new ones. Shouldn't be eye-wateringly expensive, either.
What would you want out of a pocket computer?
