Make A Ranking ?!, Hardware Ranking; what is important ? Options

[Zuse]

Hi all,

just read a bit here and there and noticed, that many people have quite different opinion what a "good" PDA should include. As far as we come to software this is not critical as everyone can change it later over and over again.

As far as the hardware is discussed there should be a ranking to meet the opinion of most people out there.

E.g. I totally need no finger-print reader. IMHO, these devices are useless and it was demonstrated that this devices can be easily entrapped (more easily then a good password). Hence, they give a totally wrong feeling of security.

On the other side, battery-life-time is more important to me than everything else.
What do all these bells and whistles mean if you can only run them for 1.5 hours without recharging? I like to see a device with a more then full working day (10-14 hours) continuous runtime, which should end up in charging the device every third week or every month for normal usage vs. power off periods.

Thus, for sure a web-cam will be fine, but if it will eat up 10 % of my battery life time, I really can live without it.

For me the most critical point to create the perfect PDA would be therefore, the development of the best power-management available on the PDA-market.

Furthermore, try to keep everything as flexible as possible. Instead to integrate a web-cam at the top of the display (as some sonys-laptops did), it might be a good idea to create a hidden USB port there. There are hundereds of very tiny cams on the market already, just stick one at the top of the display if you need one. This will gurantee, that later developements (e.g. more pixels, more fps etc.) can be easily upgraded by everyone. On the other hand, there might be some smart users, which find other devices on the market to be usefull.
In addtion, this will reduce the price to a affordable barebone set-up with a lot of individual add ons.

Just my two cents

Zuse

[Da_Blitz]

your points about wifi and bluetooth on CF are quite valid until you look at some of the design comprimises and goals of this design placing a CF card will place huge constraints on the case design as well as the PCB layout so i want to avoid that. CFIO was dropped for several reasons, mainly that we were chucking everything on board (more on that latter) but as we dont have CFIO having a CF wifi or bluetooth card is pointless. you could use USB if you dont mind somthing sticking out but one of the design goals is that i can fit it into my pocket

i have an application or two that would benifit from things such as built in wifi and bluetooth and that is who i am primarly designing it for

if it comes down to making a call as to what is and isnt included then i will be chosing what i will be using. if i have to it will come to a vote for dev team members however at the moment the only pearson who really qualifie for dev status is me (not to sound like a dictator, to get dev status you have to ask for it and you have to be able to contribute substantial back)

back on topic:

bieng out striped is nothing new as we will most likly have developers developing for a nice P4 system so nothing new there, for gaming a boost to the SDL libries and mplayer would be nice and easy to do, any gaming i do will be quake 1 or 2 which should run ine on the thing

your list of target areas is quite acute, however the bottom 2 share alot in common and could almost be colappsed into one while the top 2 have simmilar needs.

there is a reason to chuck stuff into the design rather than making it a plugin, by placing it in the design it forces you to design for it. and i dont just mean at a hardware level.

any way there are still some things that are on my listof "to be dropped" due to avalibility of chipsets ore the problems with interfacing it to the chipset so dont expect the final design to have everything we specified in it, remeber that we were going to add everything we wanted to a list and then start cutting down that list, at the moment we are cutting it down

the having to throw it away part is valid that is why i am standardising on USB, it is unlikly that usb will dissapear in the next year, UWB may come up however the adaptors will have to be connected somehow. in my opinion CF is dead and SD cards are taking over and i think that the design reflects this.

of course i didnt mention the wireless and when they will be out of date, i think bluetooth is dead. IMHO it never really took off like some people said it would. about the only thing it is used for is headsets, we may be diffrent but thats what the rest of the population is using it for. i belive that thats why they are pussing for inclusion with the UWB crowd, they relise they are dead otherwise as USB already has all the stuff that bluetooth is supposed to be good for (networikng (PAN<>usb-net) and audio, OBEX exchange works over ethernet so you can mave files about easily) if the bluetooth commite was smart they would have seperated the lower levels from the higher levels in thier design so that it could run over somthing like ethernet

as for wifi i dont think that 802.11n will be here any time soon, call it a hunch even if it was i see little benifit in using it in a PDA except for the longer range