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One piece of hardware, not much bigger than a standard walkman, incorporating an MD Walkman, a mobile phone, a pager, a PDA, a FM radio, an MP3 player, and a GPS. Comes with microphone headset.
Updated/backed up to/from PC so if you lose it you don't lose everything.
Use internet downloads
to upgrade firmware in the box to keep space needed by components to a minimum (eg making the mobile phone SIM card redundant).
The screen would be PDA-sized (similar to the Palm) and integrating some of the 'applications' would make life a lot easier - using the Palm-type text interface to compose text messages for the phone etc. etc.
The driving technology would be a silicon on insulator processor. It could contain a tiny HDD if the battery life was acceptable.
Order now for Christmas!
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Annotation:
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Very similar to a Handspring Visor, if you could plug in several modules at once (and except for the MD player, though that can't be too far off). |
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There are a number of companies aiming for this product niche already. The Qualcomm pdQ of a few years ago was a Palm integrated with a cell phone. Some cell phones these days can play MP3s and most are slowly gaining PDA-like functions. |
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The minidisc seems redundant (you have MP3s already) and unecessarily bulky (if a SIM is too big, a minidisc reader will definitely be too big). You can get GPS-like functionality by clever processing of the cell signals, especially in CDMA systems. |
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IMHO one big problem is the human-interface constraints. My cell phone is too small to put a usable PDA screen on it; even the number-pad is sometimes-inconveniently small. |
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(Whether the processor is silicon-on-insulator or some other technology is pretty much irrelevant.) |
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Yeah, what's up with the SOI? Is
this thing supposed to be rad-hard
as well? |
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egnor: SOI suggested for power efficiency. |
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Should be rad-hard. Nuclear workforce needs these things too. Something to take their minds off of what they are working on. |
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