this has been a pretty damn good thread. everyone seem to be throwing out a lot of good ideas. congrats to everyone.
right now pdas are just day planners and fancy grocery lists. as wireless internet access gets better i suspect the pda will become the standard got between for many devices. so you are a professor and you have your big fancy dual g4 in your office that you design your lectures on and do your big time data crunching with. you point your ipda at your desktops ir port down load your powerpoint into your pda and go to the lecture hall and plug it into the projector outlet. lets say you forget to transfer your powerpoint project. you get to lecture. you use your wireless connection to connect to your desktop back in your office and down load the file then. let say you are upstairs in the lab. just finished collecting data from your telescope or your abi sequencer or whatever. want to take the data down to your computer in your office downstairs. connect your pda to the firewire port of your computer that runs the abi and just carry the data downstairs in your pda. look how many profs currently post all the lectures, homework, etc on the web. look how many let you email your paper to them or turn in a floppy disk. imagine how nice it would be as a prof to let your students wirelessly or ir transfer their homework from their pda to yours. no more stupid floppy disks. no more zip drives or optical drives just to carry your data from your sequencer to your dekstop. what if you are at a field station. collecting samples from traps you set, or out on a dig in montana. record all the data to your pda instead of carrying a laptop that may or maynot work in the extreme conditions in the field. i mean come on how many field locations arent either hundreds of degrees farenheit or pouring rain. field work sucks (ok i love it) and you cant carry a laptop (especially since those g4s run so hot they would overheat in most field environments).
a powerful pda could do a lot to help in education and i suspect a pda that is powerful enough to do all things i described would have applications in almost any sector. very few people sit at a desk all day and only access their data from that one point. most of us need our data with us wherever we go and need to be able to carry the data around access it from various places and record new data from some places where an ethernet connection is available. like foocha mentioned industry is very much like this. education even at the lower levels (teachers work in various classrooms and at home) is very much like this.
im not saying apple will create this pda, im just saying if they did i believe they could create a pda that would be so advanced it would be useful to more than just corporate types (and hey it might even tempt a few of the corporate types). and just think of all the ways a pda could play into your "digital hub." oooh the possibilities.
right now pdas are just day planners and fancy grocery lists. as wireless internet access gets better i suspect the pda will become the standard got between for many devices. so you are a professor and you have your big fancy dual g4 in your office that you design your lectures on and do your big time data crunching with. you point your ipda at your desktops ir port down load your powerpoint into your pda and go to the lecture hall and plug it into the projector outlet. lets say you forget to transfer your powerpoint project. you get to lecture. you use your wireless connection to connect to your desktop back in your office and down load the file then. let say you are upstairs in the lab. just finished collecting data from your telescope or your abi sequencer or whatever. want to take the data down to your computer in your office downstairs. connect your pda to the firewire port of your computer that runs the abi and just carry the data downstairs in your pda. look how many profs currently post all the lectures, homework, etc on the web. look how many let you email your paper to them or turn in a floppy disk. imagine how nice it would be as a prof to let your students wirelessly or ir transfer their homework from their pda to yours. no more stupid floppy disks. no more zip drives or optical drives just to carry your data from your sequencer to your dekstop. what if you are at a field station. collecting samples from traps you set, or out on a dig in montana. record all the data to your pda instead of carrying a laptop that may or maynot work in the extreme conditions in the field. i mean come on how many field locations arent either hundreds of degrees farenheit or pouring rain. field work sucks (ok i love it) and you cant carry a laptop (especially since those g4s run so hot they would overheat in most field environments).
a powerful pda could do a lot to help in education and i suspect a pda that is powerful enough to do all things i described would have applications in almost any sector. very few people sit at a desk all day and only access their data from that one point. most of us need our data with us wherever we go and need to be able to carry the data around access it from various places and record new data from some places where an ethernet connection is available. like foocha mentioned industry is very much like this. education even at the lower levels (teachers work in various classrooms and at home) is very much like this.
im not saying apple will create this pda, im just saying if they did i believe they could create a pda that would be so advanced it would be useful to more than just corporate types (and hey it might even tempt a few of the corporate types). and just think of all the ways a pda could play into your "digital hub." oooh the possibilities.
