plasticbag.org | weblog | The New Musical Functionality: Portability and access (by alaric)
plasticbag.org | weblog | The New Musical Functionality: Portability and access
My take on all this is that portable music, mobile phones, and PDAs and so on will inevitably converge into a general purpose portable computer.
On the desktop, general purpose PCs do everything; even the humble desk telephone is finally being subsumed by the PC with VoIP, a process that started in the 1990s but was somewhat humbled by the cost of a voice modem on every machine over a standard telephone not being sufficiently counterbalanced by advantages.
And I hate having too many pocket gadgets to carry around that (shudder) all need plugging in to recharge. Now that people are used to mastering the complexities of a general purpose computer on their desktop, I don't see any reason why a general purpose pocket computer, that (via some combination of inbuilt facilities and tiny plugin modules) can contact a mobile telecommunications network, send digital audio to your ear, and store lots of data. Other functions of such a portable device that I can see are:
- Mobile storage device for transferring information between other systems; absorbing the functionality of a "USB keyring"
- PDA, obviously! It might as well beep to remind you to be places, and maintain your personal databases (such as an address book)
- Authentication device. Anything a smartcard could do, a portable computer can do just as easily, while being slightly less loseable.
- Communications device. Anything a mobile phone can do, it can do too. Plus the ability to beam your business card via IrDA, which seems to have gone out of the window now that IrDA is out of fashion. Perhaps Bluetooth will yet provide an alternative, although the directionality of IrDA was easier to use than the Bluetooth search-for-device mechanism...
- Universal remote. Not only could it control your increasingly complex home cinema system, it could unlock your car, and maybe even be a serial console for your servers, eh? All doable via Bluetooth...
- Games platform. This is what my ancient Handspring Visor gets used for - keeping me occupied on train journeys. The fact that I can download apps for it from the Internet and load them on via USB beats the lame, slow, and costly mechanism to download Java games to my mobile phone. And there's all the possibilities of multiplayer gaming via Bluetooth or the Internet, of course.
- Media platform. As well as the playing of music discussed above, don't forget that with a little extra hardware the thing can record music and video and take pictures.
- Navigational system. You can already get a Bluetooth GPS receiver for use with a PDA, as well as GPS plugin modules for the devices themselves. This is much more useful than GPS navigvation built into your car, since you can put it in your pocket and have it navigate you around a city on foot, too. Plus all the fun possibilities of submitting entries to your blog that contain your coordinates as well as a picture from your digital camera, and then having people who are watching your blog via RSS be binged if they cross your path... The social networking applications of this get quite interesting. How about giving my friends a private URL that lets them know where I am (unless I suspend the service because I want real privacy) and can come and meet me easily?
- Data processing. Pocket calculators are pretty handy. But having a portable device with a decent keyboard, lots of storage, a fast CPU, and a powerful scripting language will increase the productivity of nerds everywhere!
For my own needs, I'm working on building a device not too dissimilar to a Psion, with the hinged screen and keyboard; not tiny like a Palm, but large enough to type on and see a lot of text on-screen, and pack a hard disk. Small enough to put in a large pocket, or slip easily into a bag. Light enough to carry everwhere.
The underlying technologies are the LPC2200 series of embedded controllers from Phillips, giving you a 60MHz 32-bit processor the size of my thumbnail and requiring very little support circuitry, 2.5" hard disks, and highly compact Flash storage on SD cards.
I've found a Bluetooth chip about the size of a postage stamp, and a similar-sized chip that contains physical interfacing for IDE, Compact Flash, SD, and MMC cards along with software implementing the FAT filesystem. An ISA Ethernet chip can provide 10MBit connectivity, which will suffice. USB master and slave can both be accomodated similarly.
The Bluetooth chip in question is designed to be able to be used in a Bluetooth headset, so as well as the Bluetooth stuff is also has a DSP, a DAC, and an ADC - so the device will have a headset socket on it, and can be a Bluetooth headset, as well as controlling a mobile phone via Bluetooth to actually make calls. The smallest Bluetooth phone I can find could either just sit in the bag with it or, perhaps, even be embedded inside without a battery, taking power from my system.
The important thing is the wide variety of I/O options on it. I have the metalworking facilities to create a strong yet light aluminium alloy casing, and the microelectronics facilities to create small-pitch PCBs and mount the relevant devices.
The only obstacle is: can I be bothered? 🙂
Sun 1st Aug 2004 9:59 pm 
Subscribe