Don't worry Margaret. I haven't found some new toy I want. In fact, this dream machine doesn't exist (To my knowledge).
Back in the day when every victim and his dog had an iPod I had a 2.5" IDE (Laptop drive) hard drive enclosure based MP3 player. I liked it because I didn't have to use iTunes, I could just drag and drop files through Windows Explorer (Or whatever shell in whatever OS I'm using at the time). This thing died when the 2.5 mm Philips headphone jack came away from the PCB inside the device. I was bummed...:-( It still works as a portable drive, so I must find someone who needs a portable drive, and they can have it.
So I looked high and low for a new portable drive/MP3 player. A new enclosure like the one I had was going to be $200 (For the enclosure alone), and this device had its own limitations, such as it ran off the internal battery, even when doing read/write operations while connected via USB. A large read/write would kill the battery (In the middle of the task...Grrr) and I'd have to wait for it to charge again, so this thing wasn't at the top of my list to purchase again. Additionally, it was a few years old and didn't play back DivX files that hadn't been specifically trans-coded for it, or MP4 (H.264), etc, not that I was watching a lot of video back when I bought it.
Now I'll divert to the side, to talk video. A while back, about the time I was seconded to IBM, I started watching video on my bus-then-train trip from Island Bay to Petone. Initially I started watching these on my PSP, which I had previously purchased for this purpose (That, and with a keyboard which I'd heard was coming for the PSP, plus the PSP's Wi-Fi and browser, I was intending to use it at a mobile computing device). As the video content I watched diversified in terms of content and source, the need to trans-code the content to a format for the PSP became a bit annoying. The key thing was I'd download something overnight, not have time to trans-code it before work, and have to wait another day before I could watch it. This was particularly annoying with news programmes. Then I got my Sony VAIO UX-180 PC (Or UMPC). This solved all the limitations of the PSP and created new opportunities for use (Though at a cost in dollars). Interestingly, one of the advantages of the VAIO was its size meant I always had it on me. This is something that has changed since purchasing my Sager notebook, and changed even more with the use of my 80 GB iPod Classic, but more to come on that later. So with the VAIO I no longer needing to trans-code the content and life was good.
What wasn't happening, when my drive enclosure died, was portable music. When I was somewhere walking around, I'd always have my music going, as many people with iPods do. Over time, this missing service became very annoying. I tried to use the VAIO for this but A) It couldn't hold my whole MP3 library and B) it was like carrying around a brick for an MP3 player. Fine if I had my man-bag (Though it would heat up while on in the bag), not fine if I didn't. Now I shopped around, and it is a fact that you cannot get a high capacity (Over say 8 GB) MP3 player in NZ at a reasonable price, that is not an iPod. I suspect this would be a different story if Microsoft's Zune was available in NZ. The cool thing about the iPod's price is, Apple subsidies the price of the hardware with the expectation that they will make up for in purchases through the iTunes store. I don't like the iTunes store (Much like I don't like iPods and the iTunes client) because they are proprietary to Apple. I'm not some huge Open Sores advocate, but I can buy a laptop for Toshiba or Dell, and sure they both have Micro$oft Windows, but at least I have some choice and I can go put Ubuntu on it if I want. If you want an iPod, it only comes from Apple, and everything to do with it comes largely from Apple (Excluding third party accessories). So in the end I caved and bought an 80 GB iPod Classic as mentioned above, and it was great. I had all my music back, and I was able to use it as a portable removable drive, something I thought I couldn't do, as I thought you could only put stuff on it via iTunes.
So a little while later I noticed that most of the videos I was downloading from places like C-Net, TED, Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, Democracy Now!, etc were already formatted as MP4/M4V (H.264) and could 'easily' be placed on my iPod, a device I now had on me even more frequently than my VAIO. This, in combination with the fact that I now had my Sager notebook on me (The primary source for downloading my daily video content, as opposed to the TV torrents coming down on our server at home), meant I'd reached the goal of being able to watch whatever I wanted, basically wherever I wanted. What this has in turn evolved in to is a situation where I don't have enough time to watch all the video I'm subscribed to, much the same for all the RSS feeds I follow via Google Reader (And part of the reason you’ll find 40+ tabs open in Firefox when you see my machine. This MUST be a common scenario over the world as people's exposure to digital content *EXPLODES*. I'm not sure how I'm going to deal with it. Prioritisation is the probable answer, but not one I like...:-(
So this diatribe above gives the context for my dream portable device. And this device has the following specs (These are all MANDATORY, excluding the camera. Don't bother pointing me towards a device that is missing ANY of these specifications):
* The full-screen touch screen of the iPod Touch/iPhone/HTC Touch HD, etc.
* The capacity of an iPod Classic (i.e. 80+ GB).
* The slide-out QWERTY (Not AZERTY!!! Shut up Marty. Long story) keyboard of anything like the HTC Touch Pro, etc. People have asked why the hardware keyboard and not to just use the soft keyboard on the iPhone, etc. I hate having my screen real estate of whatever I'm trying to look at (Web, etc) or write (E-mail, document, etc) taken up by a bloody keyboard!
* Exchange integration (My killer app for e-mail, calendar and contacts).
* Media playback including MP3, MPEG-4/H.264 (Plus DivX would be a bonus)
* Wireless including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS and available with CDMA or GPRS (I don't care which, as long as both are available for the choice) I'm not doing much mobile data yet for many reasons, including need, cost and the fact that my employer pays for my cellular data.
* Don't really care about the OS.
* A nice to have (Not compulsory though) would be a 3-4 MP camera with at least a x3 zoom.
...This device will achieve the last hurdle of merging my phone with my iPod. I'm sure this is coming. I'm a little surprised it's not here yet. I suspect there are three reasons 1) Cost (Though this is not a reason for some, and therefore not a reason unto itself), 2) patents (I'm sure there are some out there preventing this device from being a reality at this stage) and 3) Whatever other rats and mice of reasons that there are...
So yeah, there you go. I want one. Someday I'll have one. Just wondering why one isn't available now. I’d bet this device will run Google’s Android operating system. It won’t be from Apple, as I just can’t see them putting a hardware keyboard on an iPhone. Maybe someone will make a hardware add-on though I doubt it, and this would make the device rather large.
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