This has definitely been the year of high-powered miniaturization. We’ve got phone manufacturers promising us full 1080p in 5 inch screens. We’ve got full ARM-based PCs on a USB stick for $50 bucks or less (if you can find the right sale), running Android or Linux. (And how long before someone hacks Windows RT onto one?) We’ve even got 7 and 10 inch monitors running on a USB plug for laptops that need more real estate.

And yet…

But first, some background:

Not so many a year ago, when I was looking to build my latest PC, I said unto myself, “Self, wouldn’t it be neato-keen if I could actually have a little window unto my PC’s soul that would tell me handy things like, ‘Good morning, Arah,’ or warn me if my temps were getting too high, or even just tell me the time and if I had any new email come in?” There were so many things that potentially the Windows system tray / notification area should do for me … but doesn’t. For you see while many programs will do these things, you can’t see them if you’re running a game full-screen. (And who doesn’t play most games that way?) Yet gaming would be what would push my rig to overheating, if anything could. And that’s when Microsoft doesn’t try to get you to hide the dratted notification area to begin with. And if you have programs that use it properly, which most don’t. It’s an idea that failed in execution. But it’s not a bad idea. So I began a search for 5.25” CD-ROM bay type screens to bring it back in a much improved way.

Well, I did find some 5.25” bay screens, but they were all character-based. Who wants two lines of text? All at one set color at that. Talk about going back to the 1980s! What, am I supposed to write my programs for them in COBOL while we’re at it? Is this what people who turn their PCs into set top boxes and media PCs are supposed to use?

To say that it was lame and made little or no sense was an understatement of extreme proportions. Sure, it was better than nothing … but not by much.

So, failing to find any product of merit, I gave it up as a bad concept.

Well, this year, feeling in the mood to tune up my PC a bit, I re-examined the idea. I figured I’ve gotten myself a pretty snifty little Villiv S5 UMPC “laptop” years ago. I’ve upgraded my cell phone to a nice Nokia C6-01 touchscreen gizmo running Symbian Belle. We’ve got computing power in ridiculously small sizes and vibrant full-color nice resolution touchscreens to match. (Bringing us back to the introduction about high-powered miniaturization.) So surely, by now, someone has a decent 5.25” bay touchscreen device to make me smile, right? By now we practically have to be falling over brilliant little gizmos to fit that need, don’t we?

Err…

Well…

Not so much, no.

Seriously? Really?

That makes Arah sad.

I can pick up a relatively cheap (especially if used) “feature” phone designed around a touchscreen, with a full ARM processor, plenty enough RAM, and a USB port … all of the IT doo-dads needed to build such a 5.25” touchscreen monitor panel (and a crapload extra like 3G, wifi, micro SD storage, even FM radio, etc.) for easily less than a hundred bucks. Without the extra crap involved, a plain Jane 5.25” CD-ROM bay touchscreen monitor running off of USB should be able to be manufactured and sold brand new at a profit for like … $25 – $50 I recon. Done right, put an ARM-based PC in there as well to really snaz-up the capabilities of it to that of a stripped-down phone (or in other words a USB PC-on-a-stick with a touchscreen monitor built in) and it couldn’t possible retail for more than $150, available for less than $100 on sale.

Nope.

No one has done this.

Now, there are some improvements. Kind of. If you look hard enough you can at least find screens that are no longer character-based. They’re typically still monochrome. And they’ll have parts you just don’t want/need. Like an oversized volume knob. Or an IR with remote control. Because they’re meant for use in media center PCs. And they’ll come with a plethora of software you don’t want. (No, seriously. Why would you replace Microsoft’s fairly decent media software some third party crap? You’d have to make your software significantly improved to be worthwhile there.) It’s a lot of junk that you just don’t want in your trunk. And it’s still not a full-color screen, let alone a touchscreen. It still has a crappy resolution. And you’ll be lucky to even find a screen that isn’t a 4:3 aspect ratio. As if that makes any sense in a 5.25” bay. Heck, even 16:9 isn’t widescreen enough for a CD ROM bay.

Except for those few bigger devices that take up two bays. Oooh. Ahhh.

Meh.  Why would I need something that large just to tell me I have mail?  Or what temps I’ve got?

Still junk, really.

I don’t get it. I could just velcro my phone to the front of my PC and do infinitely better than any such device out there! And since my phone has wifi, I wouldn’t even need to devise a USB communication layer for it. Heck, I can get email notifications on my phone. It has a clock. I could easily set up a home screen to cover most of my needs right there. The Nokia Belle widget concept works pretty well for me.

Which isn’t such a bad idea. I might even end up doing that in the end. Out of desperation.

But it isn’t what I want!

What I _want_ is a 5.25” bay Linux (or Android) ARM-based PC-within-a-PC. I want it to have its own touchscreen, taking up most of the single bay with a vertical edge-to-edge design. (Horizontal can have spare space if needed.) It can use two 16:9 screens kludged together as one if needed, so long as it looks like one screen. I’d prefer AMOLED-based screens to save power. And the ARM processor really doesn’t need to be very powerful. Run it off of a USB cable for power and communication to my computer, preferably with a motherboard header connector instead of an external USB connector, because this is an internal part after all. And have it operate both as a standalone PC with its own OS and as a USB monitor. (The touchscreen monitor space should always be “on” to my computer, but a switch – be it hardware or software – flips the screen between showing the monitor space or the native pc-within-a-pc space.) So you can run “apps” tailored to the little bugger to do things without interfering with Windows in any way. They wouldn’t even consume PC processing power because they’d be running in the ARM core, not on the computer. And you can flip that to running a teeny-tiny extension monitor for Windows. (Or Mac. Or Linux. Etc.) That kind of flexibility should open up plenty of options and make it easy for folks to write their own applications for it to tailor it to their needs.

And throw in an all-format SD card reader or something if you have too much panel real estate left over. But it’s really not necessary. Just something infinitely more useful than an IR sensor for a keyboard that no one will use because they already have their own Bluetooth or wireless USB dongles plugged into USB slots or what have you.

Seriously. Why has no one made such a device? I can find all sorts of cheap and useless Android tablets up the asterisk! Why can’t I find one designed to fit into a 5.25” bay? It wouldn’t even need its own wired or wireless networking because it can leach that off of the USB connection. Nor does it need any battery, because it’s just a monitor. Let the driver signal it to turn off when Windows shuts down. Run the audio through the PC so that it doesn’t even need speakers. It’s a super-simplified device compared to a phone or a tablet.

Heck, you could even be really demented and make it an x86 Windows device on Atom if you wanted to. Now that would be a PC-within-a-PC! (And pretty silly if you actually had to have two licenses for Windows because of it.)

I was even thinking, you could do Siri-type voice commands from it pretty well too. You wouldn’t have to struggle against the processing power limitations of your tiny ARM core. You could pull an iOS trick, offload the real processing to something bigger. But instead of a server where they’ve cut your runtime too short to get the right answer, it’d be sent to your real computer through the USB cable and drivers, where it could run happily amok until it does what it’s supposed to do. (And would likely have to run on the PC at some point anyway because your Outlook calendar isn’t likely to be running on the pc-within-a-pc space.)

It would be the ultimate IT assistant.

A few years ago that kind of thinking would have been insane.  Who’d want to eat up CPU space like that?  But in today’s multicored world, no big deal.  We’ve got cores to spare.

And I suppose, for people who want it to be ridiculously sized, you could make a two-bay version.

(Or if you really wanted to mess with people’s minds, at some point you could make it an actual smart phone that docks horizontally into the 5.25” bay, for techies on the go. Worse yet would be that it could still be paired to the PC via wifi or 3G or 4G after being removed for remote desktop to the PC, making it possibly the only monitor in the world that could accidentally monitor itself in a quasi-useful way.)

I know. It’s a lot to ask for something so ridiculously simple. I’d build one myself if I had any idea how to. (It’s mostly the screen part that throws me. How do you even order just one or two AMOLED screens from a manufacturer? How do you even go about finding the right size? How do you control one? That’s the part that has me baffled. In theory it should be no big deal to take one of those computer-on-a-stick devices and toss a screen at its HDMI port, but in practice…)

And yes, if I Frankensteined one together myself, I would name it GLaDOS, and do my best to give it a matching voice assistance feature, Turing test antisocial AI and all. Hey, it’s at least a step up from being a potato. We’ve got testing to be done.

With a whole internal bay space available I could even see plenty of room (and need) for expansion modules. Fan controllers. Extra temperature monitoring sensors. Radiator reservoir with pump and flow rate monitor/controller. A webcam to monitor inside of your PC as it runs! Who knows what else people might want from it once they have it? Make the device generic enough and easy to program for, and even better to make the API layer open source, and you could end up with something that even Dell might find a use for in their PCs. It’d be awfully convenient to finally be able to control specific fanspeeds based on other specific temperature readings, perhaps throwing other new logic into the equations as well. Who knows all the neat things that you could do? As extras to an already great device!

And then make the version that you can duct-tape to a laptop (or build it in if you’re a manufacturer) so that you can see if you have email (or Facebook updates) from the outside of the laptop without having to open it to find out.

I get why the 4-inch monitor for a laptop is a Bad Idea. It’s too darn small to really be of use to anyone. I get why the 5 inch (or smaller) tablet is stupid. We have phones for that! They do everything that a tablet does, and then some. But this is a whole different ballgame. It’s for case modders. It’s for media PCs. It’s for geeks with greenbacks. For dorks with dosh. For nerds with … err … nickels. Well, you get the idea. It’s a niche product that no one has successfully mastered.

For someone who’s spending uber-bucks on a 27-inch extreme-definition monitor, what’s a hundie for a PC case widget that brings the system tray / notification area back to you in a meaningful way? People spend more than that on just a clock if it’s nice enough, and this is so much more, and something that you can customize to your needs.

If I had the money to just give up my day job I’d start my own company around gizmos like this. Well, that and super-cool PCs cases that are silent. But I don’t. And flirk-all if I can figure out how to get the parts from suppliers to make my own one-off prototype for this.

Besides, I’d rather consume than be consumed by. I can afford that. So drat-it, someone else make one so that I can consume it already! Buy buy buy! :p

And if someone doesn’t license a Portal-based personality core Siri-like assistant software for PCs (We’re in space.) … then I don’t know what this world is coming to. GLaDOS, Wheatly, that demented space-obsessed core, the cake recipe core, adventure core, fact core, who knows how much fun that could be to switch between them? (Or worse, have a group-mode where they’re all “assisting” you.)

Anyway, the point is, no one really seems to be taking IT gadgets seriously enough. We have the technology and parts to make all sorts of interesting things happen, but then we don’t make them. Grown-ups deserve good toys too. (Especially since we’re the ones with the money to buy them.)

Okay, so technically no CPUs were harmed in the making of this Linux kernel. And at least according to Linus Torvalds, this was a good thing, not a bad thing. Your mileage may vary, of course, but it comes down to this: 80386 CPU support has been completely dropped from the latest Linux kernel.

With all the fanfare of this Git commit title, “Merge branch ‘x86-nuke386-for-linus”, the 386 backward compatibility was finally dropped from Linux. Ye Olde Torvalds states in the comment, “This tree removes ancient-386-CPUs support and thus zaps quite a bit of complexity,” further adding, “… which complexity has plagued us with extra work whenever we wanted to change SMP primitives, for years.” And he signs off with a heartfelt, “I’m not sentimental. Good riddance.”

In all seriousness though, the 386 support was only there for legacy embedded systems. While the 386 may have been all the rage when it was introduced in 1985, it wasn’t long before it was replaced by the 486 in PCs. But it stuck around all these years in various embedded systems, from early BlackBerries to aerospace microcontrollers because sometimes that just happens. But even that couldn’t save it forever, and Intel finally gave up manufacturing 80386 CPUs for embedded systems in 2007. But it took until 2012 for Linux to finally let go of the past.

Of course if you actually still use an embedded 386 microcontroller then you’re probably grinding your teeth right now. But let’s face it, maybe you really should have upgraded at some point, eh? Three decades is an awfully long time to continue support for any computer, and five years notice is enough time for even the most dysfunctional government agency to have found and tested an upgrade. So if you still need 386 support in Linux, you only have yourself to blame for being SoL at this point. It’s not like the writing wasn’t in big bold neon lights on that particular wall. Maybe you’ve heard of ARM?

Windows 8 is (finally?  barely?) a reality and if you’re worried about the confusion between Windows OS and Windows Phone OS, or even between Windows 8 (x86 / PC) and Windows 8 RT (for ARM), then worry not … for long. At least according to Microsoft god founder, Bill Gates. One day (though when that one day may be, no one really knows) Windows will be just one operating system for all devices, regardless of hardware.

“We’re certainly sharing between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 – sharing the user interface, sharing some of those development tools, and over time we’ll just get to do more and more of that,” says Gates, adding, “It’s evolving literally into being a single platform.”

Well, we’ll believe it when we see it, won’t we? Technical predictions by anyone are just educated guesses at best, and far flung hopes at worst.  I’m not sure which to classify this as except for certainly a mix of both, even if it does come true.

Though, honestly, The Gates future where Windows is just one OS for all devices isn’t all that far-fetched … in the wrong way. If you think about how Intel’s Medfield SoC Atom line is right now revolutionizing phones by bringing x86 to the smartphone in a way that’s just as power-sipping as ARM, but with better performance…  Well, what’s to stop anyone from adding phone features to the garden variety version of Windows and just calling it a day? It’s certainly something that I’d look forward to. Who would even need a separate OS for phones then?

But just because it’s easy, and it’d work, and I’d even buy into it, that doesn’t make it the “right” way to go about it. It’d be akin to putting a whole whale on a lazy susan and calling it sushi for the masses.

What Bill Gates clearly means is that by indiscriminately cramming the Windows Phone API and user interface directly into a Windows OS where it doesn’t belong, it’s creating a platform where if you only program for Windows Phone … err … I mean Metro … err … I mean … umm … help me out here Microsoft … what are you calling it today?  But if you write your app to the base set of the Windows Runtime environment that was born of Windows Phone (and that’s a really big if) then your app (and no, you can’t really call that an application, because it’ll be missing far too much to be useful to people on desktops who need more from their applications) can be run on either Windows 8 on your desktop or Windows Phone 8 or even Windows 8 RT on your ARM tablet.

In theory.

Maybe.

If you’re lucky.

The catch is, it’s a really really really tiny subset of the Windows kernel.  If you can even call it that. Because with Win 8 / Win Pho 8, that’s not even actually the true Windows OS kernel at all. It’s just a significant part of the WinPho 8 kernel crammed into Windows 8 as an ad-hoc add-on. Where many would argue it doesn’t even belong. It’s like attaching a Curves onto the back of a McDonald’s and calling it a health center. Not only would is it not a fit for everyone, but it’s really almost completely missing the point to anyone!  In the end, we’re told, we just have to get used to it.  It may be all wrong.  It may be a nightmare to use.  But get used to it or to some other OS.

But I guess, grudgingly admitted, it’s at least a start. And that’s what has got The Gates so enthused. Because he doesn’t seem to appreciate the wrong-footedness of that start.  He’s just happy (real or put-on to convince the plebs) that Windows 8 is no longer ridiculously behind the user interface methodology anymore.  In theory.

So I think what Billy really intimates is that, one day, eventually, he hopes (well, we all pretty much hope, don’t we?) the Windows Phone kernel will be better paired to the Windows kernel so that Windows Phone will grow to be as capable as a desktop / laptop / tablet running a full version of Windows, to the point where Windows features will come to the phone. (Instead of the other way around.)  And by features I mean user interface as much anything.  So that at some point years from now using a phone and using a PC aren’t really so different from each other, if at all.

Maybe.

Granted, to me, that’s an approach doomed for failure.  Your PC is a highly powered machine with capabilities to run several large monitors simultaneously where you could actively be using many programs synchronously with one another as well as satellite applications of other uses.  What do I mean?  I’m a computer programmer.  My typical desktop lately involves the office’s instant messenger, the office’s email, one Visual Studio instance for Python, one Visual Studio instance for C++ extensions to Python, a command prompt (sometimes two), a file explorer for copying-pasting libraries when they get built, a text file where I keep instructions, and multiple web browser pages up for looking at documentation and researching how world+dog resolved problems.  So the primary task of “programming” for me right now involves typically two instances of Visual Studio, two instances of a command prompt, one file explorer, one text document in WordPad, and on average something like four open Firefox sessions.  That’s 10 windows.  Just to “program”.  Of which I flip between and read from all nearly at the same time.  Which one I “work” in changes highly frequently.  And that’s not even adding the complication of when I crank up a vSphere virtual machine to work inside of for very specific platform testing!  And, as I said, two satellite office communication layers, email and instant message, which also have to always be available.

Thank goodness I have multiple monitors for all that!

And you just couldn’t do that on a phone.

Which is what scares me about Windows 8 and Microsoft trying so hard to turn our PCs into phones.  I can’t afford that kind of unproductiveness from nonsensical limitations based on a platform I’m not working in just because someone aimed at supporting the lowest common denominator!

But even then, were that to be what Billy expects, that’s still the wrong way to go about it. Bloating Windows Phone isn’t much better than duct-taping the Win Pho API into an added layer available to developers in Windows and calling it a duck.  Just because two platforms are related does not make them the identical, no more so than your Aunt Louise is your Grandpa Joe.  If you expand the phone experience to do everything that the PC can do, you’ll have a very slow phone that requires a ridiculous amount of memory.  Just as if you limit the PC to the limitations of a phone, you’re going to end up hamstringing every PC user out there who works for a living.

If anyone at Microsoft is listening (and I highly doubt that they are, since they seem to be quite oblivious to the wants and needs of their consumers) what the right way to merge Windows Phone and Windows into one operating system is to take the full Windows x86 kernel that we all know and love/loath for desktops, and trim the fat until it can fit on even a relatively cheap phone. Preferably rejiggering the kernel in such a way as to not only minimize resource consumption, but to also compile for x86 or ARM equally … or at least potentially, with a reasonable amount of effort.  And then offer additions and expansions to those who have the hardware to use them.

You know, like Linux…

Ish.

Not that Linux even completely gets it right.  But by this day and age, Microsoft should certainly have the manpower to try to get there…

Yes, this is a rant. It’s not politically correct. This one perhaps more so than most of mine. If you want to complain, that’s nice. Send all of your complaints here.

Microsoft is the new tabletard.

Microsoft just released the hounds on the Windows 8 NDAs and I think it’s well and good to finally admit that we have a new word: Tabletard. For those unfamiliar with this word, please see commentard, twittard, celebritard, ad nauseum. And no, I do not mean people who are stupid about tables. I mean people who are stupid about tablets. Of which, now, apparently Microsoft is one of them.

Why do I say that Microsoft is a tabletard? Simple, look at what Windows 8 is. Take Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7, mash them together in the worst possible way, and tada! You now have Windows 8.

When first announced that Windows 8 would have a Metro mode and Windows 7 mode (which within this rant I will refuse to use as a term and will from now on call Phone, because that’s all it is), I rather figured that the Phone part would be something gimmicky that you can on the side. Like how Windows 7 has that Windows XP Compatibility mode. Call me crazy, but I had rather assumed that Microsoft was rational enough to comprehend that PC users use PCs. That Windows was the primary OS people want on their Windows box. That the Phone part is just there to run “apps”.

Apparently Microsoft doesn’t get it.

I guess I can’t entirely blame them. Ubuntu obviously missed the boat on that one as well.  More so than Microsoft, by a mile.

Still, it’s rather ludicrous to suddenly assume that every device you ever install your OS on is now a tablet or phone, and that it has no keyboard or mouse. You’d have to be a flipping moron to make that assumption. I mean you would literally need to be mentally retarded to assume that. Hence why Microsoft now joins Canonical (the folks responsible for Ubuntu) amongst the ranks of tabletards.

I’m already sick and tired of Windows 7’s Start Menu. I didn’t like it any better when it was Windows XP’s. The “Classic” Start Menu is what I vastly prefer, because as someone who actually works for a living, I have a lot of applications which I use. There’s simply not enough room in the psychic ever-failing-to-predict Start Menu that Microsoft has been trying to replace the classic Start Menu with forever. I am constantly using the “All Programs” button any time I can’t have my Classic Start Menu. Which is really freaking annoying.

I do not want my icons hidden.  I do not want my Start Menu shrunk.  I have a lot of icons that I need.  I have a lot of programs that I regularly use.  Stop trying to make me click a lot of extra times to do everyday tasks, Microsoft!

Now enter Windows 8, which replaces the bad Start menu with something even worse: Phone! (Remember, I am not calling it Metro.) Yes, that’s right, now a bunch of tiles make up your Start Menu. Tiles which will mostly lack any and all useful information for people like me who will be using Windows to run applications, not Phone “apps”. It takes up even more room. It’s uglier. And it’s even less useful. Huzzah?

Likewise, you get a schizophrenic experience in Windows 8. If you run a Windows application, it operates just like you’d expect. It’s the Windows experience that you know and love. But if you run a Phone app, it runs fullscreen, and with all of the finger-swiping interactivity that you’d come to expect from apps. Will people be able to figure out what to do when the run an app instead of an application?

And the bigger question is, how well will the dichotomy of application/app … aka app(lication) even work when navigating Windows. So far that’s one that people have been keeping rather quiet on. Will Alt-Tab even work at all? How does Aero handle applications vs. apps? Will navigating from within an app be like apps? Will navigating from within an application be like applications? Frankly, even if these questions are answered right now, until the final binaries hits the silicon, I’m not going to believe for a minute that tweaks and refinements won’t happen, or features of navigation change entirely. It’s a messy messy world that Microsoft is creating by treating apps as apps within Windows.  And it’s a mess the way that Microsoft is cramming Windows Phone 7 into Windows 7 and calling it Windows 8.

Seriously, is it so hard to comprehend that most people are not going to find Phone in any way useful on a desktop PC? Now if you want to enable some goofy Phone interface, as an option, I’m all for that. After all, tablet PCs like my Viliv S5 could very well use some finger-friendlier navigational aid. (Something Viliv tried to accomplish with Cube UI, but failed badly.) But again, Phone should be an option, not forced upon everyone. Not everyone has a touchscreen. Not everyone even owns a smartphone, let alone wants to navigate their PC like it were one, using a mouse instead of a finger no less. In fact most do not! A phone is a phone and a PC is a PC and never the twain shall meet in many people’s minds. So any defaulting to phone behavior or navigation on a PC’s operating system is A Bad Thing! The kind of thing that only a tabletard would design.

Obviously, I want a smartphone that can run an x86-based architecture. It’s not that I have anything against ARM, per se, just that I want to be able to run some actual software. No more apps! It’s about time we bring applications to the smartphone.

I want a real version of Microsoft Windows. Not Microsoft’s stupid upcoming port of Windows 8 to ARM. Blech! No, I want a real version of Windows. Not because I love Microsoft. Or Windows. It’s about application compatibility really. Such is life. Ideally, I’d love to be able to dual-boot my real x86 smartphone between some version of Linux and good old Windows when I need it. (Or maybe since I won’t likely be gaming on it, I’ll just VMware my Windows from Linux for a single-boot virtualized solution.)

I want a noise-canceling microphone system so that people can still hear me even if the wind blows gently by.

And the ability to switch to speakerphone, of course.

In fact, you know, I want to reiterate this here, I want it to be usable as a dratted phone! Seriously! It’s a phone! Make it one! Let’s make the calling quality of this thing actually usable, eh? All of these freaking phones that barely can even work as a phone is just ludicrous. It should be a phone first and everything else second. Call quality is the priority!

I want real on-device storage. A simple SSD hard drive solution is peachy keen with me. Maybe an SD card slot or two. Even microSD. Whatever. NO CLOUD! Really. None. I have no desire whatsoever to run everything through some slow 3G/4G network. Nor to pay an arm and a leg (or suffer penalizing slowdowns from my provider) for my allegedly “unlimited” data plan, just so that I can route everything through some nebulous “cloud” instead of storing it on my local device where I wanted it in the first place anyway, taking up tons of bandwidth and wasting my time with this slow procedure. Seriously people, until cellular network providers get with the 21st century, providing truly unlimited, unfettered, and unmolested data plans at reasonable rates, not to mention true 4G, “the cloud” is pretty much the worst idea ever. EVER! (Did you hear that Apple?)

I want two audio jacks. Not just a headphone jack, but also a microphone jack! So that I can plug in any old headset. I mean honestly, how hard can that be?

I want some kind of hybrid HMDI / DVI / VGA port or dongle so that I can plug in anywhere I need when I want a big screen or projector device.

I want at least one USB port, preferably two.

I want radio madness. Cellphone, obviously. 4G, of course. Wi-Fi, no doubt. GPS, for sure. Bluetooth, a given, v4.0 (or later depending on when this actually happens) would be nice. And while we’re at it, why not up the ante with any or all of the following: Wireless USB, Wireless HDMI (or some such HD-capable wireless stream), FM radio, digital FM radio, or even digital TV. Let’s see just how many antennas we can fit into a single device and have them all still work. And, to save power, each can be turned off individually of course!

I want the touchscreen to be multitouch and to be very responsive. These days both should go without saying, but sadly…

Haptic … but only if it works right. (On my Viliv S5 for example, haptic will vibrate as if you pressed the screen even though the screen may not actually have registered the press. I don’t know how this is possible, but it happens so often and provides so many false positives on feedback that I just had to turn it off.)

A slide-down hardware keyboard. Not the stupid netbook-style, but the simple slide down type you’d expect on a smartphone. Don’t be fancy. Keep it simple.  Maybe add a trackball with left and right mouse click buttons.  Maybe. Or even the option to add a keyboard to the back of the device. Let it plug in somehow to convert the phone into a netbook-ish-thingy. Not ideal, but still better than a touchscreen software keyboard.

These new dock-into-a-laptop-like-thing phones are also a neat concept. Or at least would be for an actual Windows-running x86-based smartphone. Then your phone really could be a laptop! Maybe it could even include things like an optical drive, an additional hard drive, extra USB ports, a long-life battery for serious usage as a computer, etc. Even the multifunction HDMI / DVI / VGA could be supported through the dock where the smartphone natively has mini HDMI, but through the laptop dock provides DVI+VGA as well.

I want a widescreen display with a MINIMUM of a 768 vertical resolution AT ALL TIMES! No matter how I rotate the phone, even when horizontal widescreen, I still want at least 768 vertical pixels. 800 would be just fine. But 600 or less, which is all too common unfortunately, just isn’t enough for some applications. Although … with Windows 8 having two visual models, one oriented towards phones / tablets and one for good old computers, perhaps docking the phone could be done in such a way as to make the phone-based user interface visible on the phone while the computer-based user interface shows up on the dock’s screen. I wonder if Windows 8 will be able to do both simultaneously…

And you know what, here I’m sure I deviate from the norm a bit, but I’d actually be just fine with a 5 inch screen form-factor, so long as there was minimal framing around the screen. I really honestly prefer my phone to not be the size of a gnat. I like being able to read what’s on the screen without zooming in all of the time.  Or squinting so much. But at the end of the day, it’s still a phone, so even if I’ll no doubt get a holder for my belt, it should still be able to fit into my pocket. (Considering that I can just barely fit my Viliv S5 into most of my pockets, a little trimmed down from that form factor would be fine.) So no bigger than that, but as big as that would be peachy. Not necessary, but welcome all the same.