:: Location Based Services ::
I picked up an old posting on John Robb's blog about location based services on PDA's versus using a tiny PC that has a bigger screen and can use Windows. I've been down that road before, so I posted this comment:
I have designed location-aware systems for real, such as http://www.metrowalker.com in Hong Kong, stuff for NTT DoCoMo and Zingo wireless portal (the first ever wireless portal as shown by Lucent at GSM Congress in Cannes in 1998).
There is no single solution that meets all needs. An obvious statement, but today there are different ways of solving the problem. I would say that downloading info ahead of time in accordance with preferences has some merits. But it assumes you are able to state preferences sufficiently well and know ahead of time your needs. That is often not the case and being mobile has surprising affect on what a user wants to know once they're out "in the field".
WiFi hotspots are great for this and so is 3G! Three in the UK have a full-colour mapping service based on bit maps, but there are vector-based approaches that work well (but yet to be adopted - perhaps embedded Flash has the performance needed?). Yes, Screen size is a problem and there is a size below which it will not work, although with sparse maps it is surprising how little information is needed to give a satisfactory sense of orientation and something is often better than nothing here.
In my research for MetroWalker I proposed a highly-responsive map-panning solution as a great enhancer to usability. The simple idea is to load more of the map than can be seen on the screen (and with 3G this is easily do-able). Preferably with a touch screen (or joy stick) - the user can pick up the map and move it around without any noticeable lag. This is possible with appropriate off-screen buffering techniques, vector or bitmap, most likely sustained by a hardware accelerator of some kind.
For 3G I have also talked about edge-processing, which is basically moving functions or content around the network to the nearest Node-B (base station) to enable low-latency off-device processing. This may or may not have benefits in this case, but of course one doesn't even have to think about shuffling the bits around if it is location-related content, as presumably it is always relevant at the associated NodeB for all users of that NodeB.
As for video content, then 3G does have the capability to deliver, but WiFi hotspots can also be used to soak up regional content as and when needed - using the map presented on the phone to find the nearest spot of course!
There are so many permutations with all this. But what is encouraging is that Three have launched with what looks to be like a useful location service using 3G.
[Note - not sure what the battery life of the OQO is going to be? For Zingo we used Toshiba Libretto's with Lucent Wavelan cards (weren't WiFi back then) and didn't get much more than 45 minutes useful service. Obviously things have moved on since then, but battery life for mobile devices has to be far greater than the average laptop - user's don't tolerate much else.]
11:47:41 AM 
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:: Bluetooth Laser Pointer and Mouse ::
