Like me, sci-fi writer Charlie Stross has some ideas and speculation about the perfect portable writing device. Namely a high resolution PDA with a portable keyboard.
Stross notes that soon — probably sometime in 2005 — PDAs with 640 x 480 resolution will likely be common and (relatively) affordable and at that resolution on, say, a 4″ screen, you’ve got an ideal portable writing platform when combined with a portable keyboard.
On the keyboard front, Stross points out that Think Outside is promising to ship a Bluetooth version of their Stowaway keyboard in May. That solves one of the drawbacks of buying portable keyboards for PDAs — having to shell out $80 or so every time you switch brands (hmmmm…okay, this probably isn’t as big of an issue for people who don’t buy new PDAs every six months).
Things get even more exciting when you combine this with other shrunken technologies.
For example, take a HP iPAQ 4155, a Stowaway XT keyboard, and a Pentax Optio S4, and for under $1,000 (well, at least before adding in the requisite SD cards for the camera and PDA), you’ve got an 802.11b-compatible PDA with a foldaway keyboard and a 4 megapixel camera that occupies less than two inches in depth for all three devices. You should be able to find a holster-style PDA carrier that can accomodate all three with no problem.
That’s moblogging in style.