Excuse the forward, but this touches on some of the personal information space considerations of Twisted. For additional illustration, may I suggest adding a Bruce Sterling book of short stories to your reading list, "A Good Old-Fashioned Future". In particular, the story "Maneki Neko" illustrates a future application of portable machines and Memex/Twisted/ReputationNetwork systems for distributed gift-culture collectives. Like ours. :-) Jason Begin forwarded message:

From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed@reed.com> Date: Thu Jan 31, 2002 12:20:41 PM US/Central To: rhodes@alum.mit.edu, "Thad E. Starner" <thad@cc.gatech.edu> Cc: wearables@cc.gatech.edu Subject: Re: [wearables] commercial survey - IEEE Pervasive Computing

Though I'm still quite excited about the potential of self-contained general purpose wearables, I have to say that the capabilities of my Kyocera QCP6035 Smartphone, the Samsung palmphone and the upcoming Treo are impressively general, and because they can be augmented by intelligence on the Internet quite easily (having escaped the walled garden of WAP), they can be quite general purpose. Already they can do something quite cool - you can attach a small GPS receiver (Pharos) to them and get live location info that drives the navigation through geographic data on the Internet. There are no car-mount or portable GPS navigation systems that can access up-to-date maps and directions - they run off of internal data only.

Thus the commercial world surrounding the Palm OS-based phones is actually poised ready to go beyond PIMs into new apps. The big limit is the bitrate on CDMA and GSM nets that is available (very low, so it pays to have local cache).

The real problem inhibiting the market is the odd idea that what you want to do with a mobile device is the class of things you do sitting at a desk in your study or office. I don't want to browse the Web in general - or compose documents or read long Microsoft word attachments.

But the Palm phones are plenty powerful enough to do cool things in conjunction with general purpose intelligence elsewhere.

At 09:56 AM 1/31/2002 -0800, Bradley Rhodes wrote:

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Computer enthusiasts have been known to rewrite a MP3 player's interface software to allow the uploading and downloading of any type of data, effectively making the device into the equivalent of a large floppy disk. More recently, these devices are merging with PDAs and cellular phones to create a wide variety of available products. IDC expects sales of portable devices with digital audio playback capability to grow to 15 million units by 2005. In a sense, these devic

It's not just computer enthusiasts anymore. The iPod is both an MP3 player or, at the flip of a switch, a firewire 5G hard drive. A friend of mine uses it both to play music and to store all her personal email, so she can read email at work without tainting company disk with it.

You touched on the question of general-purpose, but I'd love to see it addressed further. The average PC owner has a web browser, email reader, full office suite and game machine all in one box. Because of inherent interface constraints, the Palm Pilot is only widely used for PIM applications: short memos, calendar, phone and to-do lists. Wearables have even more interface constraints than pen-based systems, which implies to me they'll be even more task specific, at least until we get a bluetooth equivalent that lets you have task-specific interfaces all sharing one processor/memory/battery attached to the belt somewhere.

Comments?

Brad

-- Bradley Rhodes Intelligence Augmentation | Software Agents | Wearable Computing http://www.bradleyrhodes.com/

- David -------------------------------------------- WWW Page: http://www.reed.com/dpr.html