Technology Wish List
I was just laying down and started having these thoughts. Maybe it's the codeine. Here's some things that I wish existed, but don't. Not because of some technical issue, but because of political or marketing issues or just generally dropping the ball.
I want:
MacOSX on cheap x86 processors. Why is Apple insisting on using Motorola? The G4 hasn't kept up in the speed race and it makes all their parts more expensive. Why not switch to Intel/AMD architecture, especially now that they are moving to 64 bits? MacOSX on the Itanium II! That would rock! Why not? It's what we all want.
Palm UI with Linux underpinnings. Why doesn't Palm just ditch their OS and replace the base with Linux? Like Sharp has done, except with the Palm UI and great synching. Forget trying to integrate BeOS and all that crud (as if they've been doing that in the first place), go with a powerful 32-bit OS that's open and supported.
A Symbian phone without the camera or gimmicks. I want a Symbian phone without the camera. I know this is heresy, especially since all the telecoms want to push MMS, but I want a super light and small Symbian phone that does 90% of what my PDA used to do. Cutting the camera will help - look at how thin the N-Gage is. And I want a slot for the MMC card that's easily accessible like the Palms.
A 17-inch super, super high resolution screen. Why am I still looking at 1024x768 resolution? I can still see the pixels from 2 feet away. I want something 12 times the resolution, but with icons/text the same physical size. What's the resolution of paper? 1200 dots per inch is the minimum to look like it doesn't suck, right? My screen right now is 91 dots per inch. I want my laptop to be as easy to read as paper.
A tablet PC that's not from Microsoft. Applet get your act in gear! Come on. We know you have the writing technology and the miniturization capabilities like you showed in the 12" PowerBook, so just do it already. And give it a decent processor and battery life while you're at it.
A unified Bluetooth/WiFi spec. You can't just say use WiFi, because Bluetooth has its advantages in low-powered devices. I want them to work it out... maybe in a SpeedStep like solution. It's just a specification, I mean, just figure it out. And I want this One Wireless solution to be at least as fast as 802.11g.
A 5 Gig Multimedia Memory Card (MMC). Okay, so maybe this is more wishful thinking, but I'd really like some serious removable memory in my phone/pda.
Java as a runtime. Why must I distribute 10 megs of Java libraries if my app only uses less than a meg of that code? Why can't I just run a tool that will analyze the classes that my application and libraries use, and package only those used up into a true Java Runtime? So instead of having an app that's 300k and a runtime that is 10 Megs, I can have the whole app be less than a couple meg. Do we really need RMI, SQL and Swing in every application that uses Java? I want to be able to just cut them out.
Java that doesn't suck on mobile phones. On the same note, J2ME is such a castrated technology (Sun did the cutting, but cut out TOO much). Maybe if you're trying to get Java to run on some 16 bit Dragonball 11Mhz processor it's a solution. But on my Nokia 7650 with 104Mhz StrongARM? Why put the code into a sandbox? Or on the P800 why make Java developers use the JDK 1.1-level techology that is PersonalJava? Think Sun! Think about technology that will be common TOMORROW not today. I want Java 1.4 running in my hand!
WYSIWYG Editors in Browsers. There's not one browser yet that allows you to put Rich Text in a textarea. Opera 7 and Safari were both just launched, yet this is still missing.
Any more? Drop them in my comments. I'm sure I'll think of some more.
-Russ