The One Device

We have a lot of different devices coming along now, that will do a lot of different things for you. They'll get your e-mail, play your music, tell you where you are and help you get to where you want/need to be, show you your movies, display books for you to read, let you talk to others (via various means), allow you to play games, watch your auctions, let you surf the Internet, manage your finances, track your contacts, appointments, and tasks...pretty much help you manage your life and the important things in it. Unfortunately, there isn't the "one device to rule them all" that you might hope for, something like Dick Tracy's watch. Each device will do some subset of the above, but not all of them. It's like, the device makers can still only go so far, and that's disappointing.

I wondered what my ideal device would look like, in terms of features and functionality. My ideal device would have the following features and abilities:

0. NOT BE A LAPTOP, OR LARGER THAN A STANDARD CELL PHONE OR PERHAPS THE SIZE OF A KINDLE (let's get that out of the way right now...PCs of any type take too long to boot and be ready to do their work)
1. Track my appointments, to-dos, contacts, and even random thoughts in a flexible, reliable way.
2. Play my music, on speakers or headphones according to my choosing (ALL OF IT, on demand...not just some slice of it that I can fit onto the device). Also, adding music should be VERY simple, with at least 2 different ways to put it on the device (cumbersome proprietary-software-based methods, via USB cable only, need not apply).
2a. Listen to my Sirius satellite radio. Those of you who have any kind of satellite radio or have heard it know what I'm talking about. Once you get used to the ability to pull from just about any musical genre you can think of, in mere moments, regular terrestrial radio just doesn't measure up.
2b. The ability to record audio from external sources and the various incoming feeds is nice but not required.
3. Show my videos (all of them would be nice, but I could live with 15-20 full-length movies' worth. Couple this with the music collection requirement and you have a device that needs at least 40GB of storage to be usable and 80GB or more to really hit the mark)
4. Take pictures and videos at a decent resolution (not the crummy resolution used by many "top-of-the-line" cell phones) and store ALL my pictures for on-demand viewing.
4a. The ability to record videos either via camera or via other means/feeds is nice but not required.
5. Show me maps that show me where I am and help me get to where I'm going, i.e., some type of GPS, preferably with live traffic updates and intelligent rerouting on demand (some GPS personal navigation devices already provide this, so it shouldn't be too big a deal)
6. Let me talk to whoever I like, via voice, text messages, or IM, at my choosing
7. Help me track my finances and sync up with my bank (syncing to my PC/laptop is acceptable to achieve this)
8. Let me play basic games, at least Yahtzee, solitaire, Monopoly, and the like
9. Surf the Internet at a reasonable speed wirelessly (so WiFi and/or 3G cell connectivity is needed)
10. Have a full keyboard or the ability to access one easily, without some corny add-on
11. Let me read and store a sizable collection of e-books (and preferably, books I already own), as well as provide easy access to documents I can load in separately in PDF, DOC, and other standard formats
12. Allow me to load other third-party software to accomplish other personal life tasks like monitoring my blood pressure (it doesn't have to actually READ it but it should let me record the readings), watching my diet, tracking my exercise, that sort of thing.

Granted, this would be a pretty difficult device to build successfully at this point in our technological lifecycle. All the necessary radios and chipsets that would have to be built in, as well as the necessary screen size ranges that would have to be available to accomplish other tasks, would currently be prohibitive, and the device would probably not perform all of these tasks very well. Even though the technologies are getting smaller and smaller, there is still only so much you can do with the existing tech for a certain form factor.

So that being said, this would probably take two devices to accomplish currently, but it should take no more than two. And I don't want anyone out there to start shouting "iPhone!!" Remember, I'm into TOOLS, not LIFESTYLES, and this device or these devices would be TOOLS. I'll admit that the iPhone does well but I'm just not going there; they're over-priced anyway, and I'm not going back to the vagaries of Cingular/AT&T as my cell provider. I came pretty close with my old Treo 650. It did a lot of the above, and did it well. Palm also built a device briefly that they called the LifeDrive, but it died a quick death for some reason. It probably wasn't very capable at its tasks and languished with the push to the Treo smartphones. My new cell phone, an LG eNv, doesn't really measure up, especially in to-dos and calendar, though the full-sized keyboard and text messaging capabilities are pretty good. The Archos devices do really well in the multimedia realm, and one model has GPS capabilities (at the expense of some storage and other features). Most the the GPS devices are available with some multimedia capabilities built in, but they're lacking in other areas.

Now, back to the optimism: I expect that some companies are already working on such an ideal device (especially one whose name starts with "A" and rhymes with "Dapple"), and a production model will probably be available for a device that performs all of the above, and probably a bit more, within 2-3 years. Really, the technology to do it is right around the corner, given how many features we can already cram into a single device. In fact, that device will probably be able to download movies straight off of authorized websites (like Netflix or Blockbuster), watch TV programs any time, straight from the network websites (like Battlestar Galactica on Sci-Fi or Heroes from NBC or Grey's Anatomy over on ABC), and let you talk voice via regular 3G cell or WiFi-based IP telephony. That really would be "one device to rule them all," the end-all, be-all of current available technology that would help you run your entire life.

Thanks for reading along.