confessions of a serial hobbyist

I’ve long been searching for the ultimate gadget. The one device I can take with me that will do everything, and liberate me from my handful of gadgets I bring with me everywhere I go.

Currently when I head in to work I grab:
My cell phone (currently a Nokia N80)
My Nintendo DS Lite
My iPod (30gig video)
My laptop bag (containing 15.4″ MacBook Pro, and in its pockets my PalmTX, and the ever important deck of cards)

And I hate it. I want one device, that does everything well, that fits sveltly into my pocket. So, I came up with a list of features for my one ultimate device:

It must be a phone. I need to have one with me so if I only carry 1 device it has to be a phone. VOIP over WiFi won’t cut it (though honestly VOIP over EV-DO or HSPDA data would be acceptible). WiFi is a necessity, and 3G data is preferred, not because of the additional speed, but because of the ability to still work while on the phone. Bluetooth is a must.

I want a decent camera. I don’t do a ton of photography, but sometimes I see something and I want to snap a picture. My current phone, the Nokia N80 handles this quite well as I can take a picture, upload to flickr directly from the phone, and go about my day.

It has to play my music and videos. My cell phone does a pretty good job with this as it is, with the exception of no bookmarking support when listening to podcasts. But there’s the storage limitation there, and even 2 gigs gets filled up rather quickly…but this could be solved by…

It has to be able to access remote file-shares. We live in a data hungry world, and with limitations on size to carry data, it’s much preferred if I can just mount a remote fileshare from a fileserver than to deal with moving parts in a portable device. Accessing via the web is here now, but I can’t write back to it. I want to truly mount a remote filesystem and access the files as if they were local. Plus, I pay for unlimited data from Cingular so I try my best to get my money’s worth.

I need to be able to work from it. As an engineer, and one who usually works with closed development systems, it means I unfortunately needs access to windows. Which in the case of my 1 ultimate device, it means I need to be able to access windows systems via rdesktop or VNC. To properly use windows I need a decent resolution, keyboard, and mouse, so…

I need to be able to attach keyboard, mouse, and monitor (preferably over DVI) when at my desk. I don’t care if on its own the device has a qwerty keyboard or not (I’m fast enough at T9 these days) but I need to be able to attach a keyboard for when I need to get work done - writing code via T9 is a frightening proposition. The video-out should support high resolution (higher than the devices LCD, 1280×800? 1920×1200?) so I can be productive. USB is desired to plug in to a printer, or external harddrive/DVD drive/etc.

Basically, my end goal is to have a single device that I take with me, and is usable on its own, but that I can then plug in to keyboard/mouse/monitor at home and have it be my “full computer” as well.

And the sad realization is that I’ve yet to find anything that meets all of those goals…though I’ve played with and know of a few devices that come close:

1) Nokia’s Internet Tablets. I’ve played with a 770 before, never the N800. It had a good enough resolution that I could imagine getting work done, supports bluetooth keyboard, COULD be modified to support a mouse (it’s linux+X11 afterall), and with some tweaks can use a USB keyboard, or USB harddrive. It can remote mount shared filesystems, and has a decent little development community behind it. Unfortunately, there’s no video-output (though there are some USB-only monitors that were announced recently…I wonder if these could be made to work), and most importantly no cell service so it’s not my phone, which kills it right there.

2) The Nokia N95 or E90. Monsters of the cell phone world with accelerated 3d, TV-out, bluetooth support for keyboards, USB for attaching to a printer, but also not without limitations. No mouse support in the OS (which means rdesktop/vnc into a windows machine to get work done would have no mouse…unless bluetooth mouse support was added in the app itself - possible?), no attaching USB harddrives, no (that I’m aware of) support for mounting remote filesystems, and while it has video out, it’s only TV-out, which a number of monitors support but lacks the high resolution to have a windows VNC session be usable for real work.

Now it’s true that this post has mentioned a number of Nokia products, and maybe I’m a bit of a Nokia-whore these days (and an Apple-whore to be fair) but frankly they just seem to be pushing some of the best converged devices I’ve seen recently. Honestly if I had a device that supported everything I want above, I wouldn’t care who makes it or what OS it runs.