Super Comp

Back when iPhone 1.0 came out, my friend asked if I would buy it. We had previously discussed features we would look for in a phone, and the iPhone had easily surpassed our wish list. However, the moment it hit the market and I had a chance to play with it in the store, the bar for base expectations went straight up. Call it greed, or utopic condescention, but I felt it wasteful to shell out hundreds on a device that didn't offer all of these features:

• A great phone with bluetooth connectivity as well as excellent speaker and microphone for handsfree operation
• Top notch email and calendar capabilities
• Music player applications
• A minimum of 32 Gigs of disk space
• GPS with voice navigation
• Internet browsing capabilities
• Chat application
• Easy to use keyboard
• Optionally, a built in radio

The advent of Android has brought about a nice little war between the platforms, with apps popping up all over that have significantly challenged the iPhone and iPad. 

While the phone landscape has seen quantum innovation, the laptop and personal computing space has remained relatively stagnant. While manufacturers have experimented with screen size and processing power quite a bit, there hasn't been very much innovation in the realm of usability and 'smarts'. While the tablet brings a fresh avenue of thinking to computing, especially with gesture and touch support, the fact remains that those devices fall short when it comes to replacing the laptop, mainly due to poor text input support and disk sizes. 

It is time for the PC to take the next big leap, inherit the plusses of the tablet, but take it beyond that to provide a complete set of tools that will allow consumers to invest in a single device that covers business and personal needs. As in the case of the phone, my wishes seem to have a tendency to become reality, so here's hoping that this wish list for a PC device has the same fate:

• Hardware:
• Needless to say, a 64 bit quad core or better processor with a minimum of 4 Gigs of memory
• Minimum of a terabyte of disk space
• HDMI interface capabilities to hook up to home theater systems
• 15-17 inch high def antiglare screen (I feel like a giant peering into 13 inch screens)
• Pro-grade sound card for music making on the go
• Top wireless, bluetooth connectivity
• Full size back lit hideaway qwerty keyboard
• HD webcam
• Thunderbolt support
• 4G connectivity support
• Accident proof sturdy kevlar and/or aluminum construction
• GPS!
• Day-long battery, under full use!
• Tablet or macbook air/ultrabook weight range
• Usability:
• Facial and voice recognition for security
• Touchscreen and multi-touch trackpad with gesture support
• Think positioning multiple windows around simultaneously with finger gestures
• Motion/direction/proximity sensing capabilities for auto on/off, behind the scenes email sync, screen orientation etc
• Seamless connectivity with media on the cloud or network disk
• Seamless work sync across devices (local hard disk size negotiable depending on robustness of this functionality)
• Sleep-time app updates and data backup (cloud/network disk)
• Browsing history based intelligent RSS for morning and evening news
• Single sign-on for computer login, social media, and other accounts, with 'auto open' feature for app and browser links that need sign on
• In-built productivity suite (notes, reminders etc)
• NFC capabilities to perform data transfer and live work interaction with collaborating peers during meetings
• Think Banner and Stark in the Avengers
• NFC media transfer with cameras, phones, etc
• Oh, many more, but let's start with this, shall we?

And so the search continues. Maybe once I have this device, I won't need a heavyweight phone. Maybe a simple old-school numpad cellphone without the data features would suffice, with the featherweight 'super comp' doing the heavy lifting for me.