Handtops, UMPC - What I want in mobile computing -

Desktops have been around for decades, and we still use them. We now have handtops. Theres pdas, mac mini, etc... Cell phones, satelite phones, and tv, and internet, wireless everything. Of course don't forget our stereos, musics and movies. Light weight components, more energy efficient, greater density in processing and storage. Stereo-scopic head-mounted displays. Voice recoginition is getting closer, and hand-writing recognition works well-enough. Mobility.
But no one has put it all together.

Give me a little black box. Modular, upgrable. I/O ports out the ying-yang, pairs of them. usb, parrallel, serial, rca, modem, ethernet, etc.. And since we still have many cd/dvd it needs a drive. Got to have a battery pack. Maybe as a seperate piece, that can be attached, or can be placed elsewhere and just connect by cord. Removable disk drives, pairs of them also, for easy transfer of data. Either that or through a big tunnel i/o port, and just a gargantuan drive. Maybe flash instead of mechanical. Which uses less power? built-in wireless and satelite, and cellular.

Size will be a little bigger than the current mac mini,... perhaps. Seems they could have made it with smaller components, and more energy efficient ones too. Imagine a handtop, with a cd/dvd burner, and a wider varitey of i/o ports. Take away the display, and the keyboard and the tablet.

what about the display? 3d HMD's are a little bulky still, and take a bit of battery. There is new LCD technology that only requires power when its being updated. So load an image. If it is still, there is no power usage, it remains fixed. A little coding logic, and you only have to update the specific pixels that will change, thereby using only a slight bit of juice. These can be made into very thin, flexible, light, shapes of any kind. So fabricate some glasses. And make the two sides seperate, and hinged, so I can flip one or both up, out of my viewing space, to see the reall outside world, or just let my eyes relax. Shoot, a mini cam on the front could be added, and pipe the feed in. (so now we also have the camcorder) Now my display has just become as big as I want. (Even a 21" monitor gets cluttered the way I work, and besides I hate the ergonomic insufficiences of most desks) And since motion tracking has also become reasonable... Of course some people might want a monocle, so have that too. And it requires integrated headphones, and mouthpeice.

But we still need some way to tell it what to do. Maybe a keyboard on one side that folds in half for storage and transport. And on the other side is an LCD tablet. With the new LCD tech, it could double as a display actually. Make both as additional modules that can be taken off. I don't know how gloves are coming along. I have used a wireless 3d mouse before, and it needed a little work. And of course voice recognition will eventually (maybe soon) be viable for daily use.

So i no longer want a desktop. Laptops are too big. With the size of handtops, theres no reason why my cell-phone, pda, stereo, vcr/dvd, clock, radio, alarm, gps, etc... all dont go into the same small unit. With the current state of human-computer interaction, and wearable computing, we ought to be able to get it all together. At current market prices i would expect this to be about $5-6k A little steep some would argue. But how much do people spend for all of that as seperate pieces? How much is it worth it to people to be able to have all of it with them whereever they go? How much is it worth to not have a bunch of different things when one would work? And, of course, it will come down some as it becomes more common.

i have no desire for wet-wiring. though it seems there is research being done even into that. seems what I am asking for can be done now.