Moon on a stick! (feature wishlist)

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Ever think that the XDA was released a little early, and that there should have been a few 'basic' features.

Ok, we all love the XDA / MDA / 'whatever', but I bet some of us feel that we'll have to upgrade just a bit sooner than we'd liked, just for some really useful stuff.

So here is the beginnings of a wish list. Things that I consider should be standard on the next PDA I buy, because after all, that one WILL be the last one I ever buy :wink:

Some of this is availble as 3rd party, but it should be standard. It is standard on most Nokias

1) All the stuff currently on the XDA. (We don't want to lose anything do we)

2) At least 64Mb RAM - how many people went and hung themselves when the 64Mb version was released for less money than the 32Mb!!

3) >16bit colour

4) SDIO - it seems a waste not to include this

5) CF slot. CF is so flexible, and fast. It should always be there really.

6) Back-up battery. You can't run off this (or you would, wouldn't you?), but it should try and hold the memory for at least 2 weeks.

7) WLAN. You're sat at home, in your armchair, and you just want to look up who played that part in that film - do you get up and use your broadband for free, or use your GPRS on your phone.

8) Bluetooth. not as important when the above is availbable, but would be nice to have the headset, and communication with other phones etc.

9) MMS. How did they miss this one? A perfect money spinner for the network op.

10) Voice recognition.

11) Some kind of contact profiling. Ring tones, call lenth counters, etc.

12) Character counter for SMS messages (I realise this is an outlook shortfall, but still).

13) An easy way to re-send failed SMS in outlook.

14) Microsoft CE.NET (one day, maybe)

15) Consumer IR - should have been higher on the list. Unfortunately the IR port on a XDA is not powerful enough to transmit consumer IR signals very far. This is available now on some iPAQs. Why not use your phone as a universal remote control? design your own remotes, create macro buttons that enter '129' in sky for example (Paramount).

16) Fingerprint reading. Now available on iPAQs. With the right type of touch screen, this is a reality. What an excellent security measure. No need to get out your pen to enter your PIN, just touch the screen.

17) Master USB. Wouldn't it be great to be able to plug in all those USB devices you have. cameras etc.

Feel free to add your own dreams

Oooh, some of those are really good!

Out of the ones you put I'd rank the memory highest, followed by Bluetooth and SDIO. CF I'd put lowest, especially as it would increase the size of the device.

Here're my suggestions:

How about user-definable buttons? Would stop XDA-gaming being crippled.

Tri-band would be very nice too - if only to make ROM upgrades easier for everyone

Integrated answerphone

A T9 input method for texts - no stylus needed, and very fast.

A proper headphone jack?

Volume rocker instead of button - down as well as up!

Some excellent ideas. Point noted about CF - probably not needed either if BT, WLAN and SDIO are present.

I was thinking about some of those things too, but never got them down - well done. I'm actually looking to produce a T9 solution, but it requires a good think first.

oooh, if you can do a t9 i'd love you forever - not in that way, you understand

especially something akin to the smartphone's solution that can find a contact / predict a number for use on the dialling screen, but i'd be more than happy with a soft-input method for text entry that emulated t9. iirc, tegic did something like this but not for pocket pc. am i wrong?

cheers

movies

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I looked at the nokia communicator aka Brick.
I found this device works well with movies, well so they said!!

But what I wanted more than anything is to sit on those long journeys watching a movie. a few short coming swith this though.

-Battery life too short (with screen light on, with phone activated)
-Memory, need more colours & smoother rendering.
-Storage Cheaper compact flash much better.
Or WLAN for watching TV at home...

Imagine sat on the bog watching the re runs of red dwarf!!!!

A few dreams, but those "proper pda's" look so appealling in comparison.
Well lets see what we can do with it....

Martin

Yeah... I always forget about storage when thinking of WLAN.

You can browse, watch a film, connect to your PC with terminal server, all while sat on the bog.

How about this:

plug a TV card into your PC (running Windows 2000 server and media services), and then retransmit your Sky TV over the WLAN. Then you can watch 'Men and Motors' in any room on your PocketPC. Get caugt short in the middle of a film? take your PPC with you.

Well, if this is to be the last device I ever buy, it better contain GPS and a camera as well.

#Peter Poelman

"The last device I'll ever buy"
will be purchased around the time I die

And a giant LASER!

Being realistic, I don't think a fully integrated do-everything device is the best choice:

partly due to size constraints, but also the battery drain would be immense - and if your camera ran out of batteries, so would your PDA, phone, GPS unit, mp3 player and whatever else you'd decided to put in it . It would also be non-upgradeable, hugely expensive (see the new Clie for proof), and if anything broke the whole unit would have to go off, leaving you gadgetless. Oh, and you can only do one thing at once - no phone and camera combo at once, laddy!

So while it may sound cool to integrate everything, I would prefer connectivity options - then you can bring along new devices as you need without having to change the main one. Kind of like Apple's new Powerbooks - heavy on the connectivity, not necessarily on the built-in features.

I dunno, I just think the connectivity and battery should be dealt with (as well as the OS tweaks we've listed) before any funky new features are added.

2 cents and all that

To a certain extent I would agree. It would be nice to have things like BT and WLAN integrated, and also consumer IR should be integrated too, but things like a camera should be an external option.

I think that falls into connectivity - which was precisely my point