Next generation of PDAs?

John.Maloney at disney.com John.Maloney at disney.com
Fri Sep 7 19:57:29 UTC 2001


Stephen,

You might try an iPaq with an IBM microdrive. It would be fairly small
and microdrives come in 340 MByte to 1 GByte sizes, with larger ones
on the way. The down side is limited battery life--the microdrive uses
up a fair amount of power when spinning. On the other hand, you could
read and buffer many megabytes of date so the disk could be on standby
most of the time.

The iPaq is a very nice Squeak machine for deployment. The small
screen and lack of a keyboard makes it inefficient for programming.
I run MVC; Morphic is not well suited to touchscreens.

	-- John 

At 10:41 PM -0400 9/6/01, Stephen Pair wrote:
>I'm sure many people on this list have seen the relatively recent HDD
>based MP3 players that have come into the market (if not:
>http://www.pjbox.com).
>
>What strikes me as incredible is that there hasn't appeared an entry in
>the PDA market based on this concept (that I know of).  I would love to
>have a device that has 20GB of secondary storage that fits into a shirt
>pocket.  I would love it even more if it ran Squeak (of course) and
>could:
>
>- become the computational engine (or just storage) for your home
>entertainment system (with that much storage you could store a good bit
>of video, mp3s, video games, etc)
>- interface with a automobile computer system
>- serve all the traditional PDA functions
>- interface with your home network (and automatically back itself up
>overnight)
>- plug into a desktop or laptop form factor as it's computational engine
>(or it's storage)
>- interface with a home and cellular wireless network
>
>Does anyone know of such a device?  Seems like it could be a huge
>market.  Current PDAs are too limited in terms of storage capacity and
>it's a pain to keep them in sync.  The current devices only have about
>12MB of DRAM, but I would imagine you could build something with 256MB
>of DRAM or more and still keep it small.
>
>- Stephen






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