Future Tense: Good Little Ideas
PrintSomebody had the good idea to put a camera into a cellphone. This was a good idea. It was a great idea. What made it even better was including a slot for a Micro-SD card. I have a 32-gigabyte chip in my phone and I haven’t run out of storage yet. I can shoot photos or movies wherever I go—and email them immediately. I can read e-books or listen to music or watch videos. (The Samsung Galaxy phone has a great screen.)
The smartphone is a combination of many good ideas and its overall usefulness should be a guide for all manufacturers of portable electronics.
So why doesn’t the iPad have a memory card slot? Why doesn’t Amazon’s Kindle Fire have a slot for an SD card? A 32 gigabyte card is less than half a benjamin at Fry’s electronics. (The 64GB cards are still too expensive for most users.) Expanding the capacity of the device expands its usefulness to the user.
All tablets should have memory card slots. Too many of them don’t. The Motorola Xoom has one, but it’s inactive pending a firmware upgrade. The lack of add-on memory is one of the reasons I haven’t bought a tablet yet. I want a tablet that can do everything my phone does—and on a large enough screen to be convenient.
Where else would add-on memory be useful? In an iPod or a Zune. Microsoft has discontinued the Zune. Too bad. If they had given it a mini-USB port instead of a custom one and a slot for an SD or Micro-SD card, they would have had a product not only superior to the iPod, but significantly superior—enough perhaps to carve out a viable future for the product. The user could have had multiple libraries of music without having to erase old music to make room for new. That would have been a selling point.
How about a memory card slot in your TV so you can store photos and videos instead of having to plug in a flashdrive? And maybe you could have your TV function as a DVR as well, letting you record shows for later viewing. Wouldn’t that be convenient?
Where else would a memory card slot be useful? How about your car stereo? Why shouldn’t it provide storage of your favorite music? Why should you have to plug your iPod into it? How about your car’s GPS system? Certainly it would be an advantage to be able to upgrade its database of maps and locations of restaurants and hotels and gas stations as easily as popping out an old card and sliding in a new one.
And what about Bose? They sell prestigious music systems—wouldn’t it be great if it had a memory card slot so you could play your own library of music without having to plug in the iPod? Even better, what if it could be used as an audio-DVR so you could pause a program or rewind it or even save it for later? And then you could pop the card into your car stereo for the drive to work. Ohell, why not have the car stereo have the same audio-DVR capabilities too?
Being able to add or swap memory to a device expands its overall usefulness. It’s a good little idea and I’m disappointed that so many manufacturers haven’t recognized the possibilities.
Here’s another good little idea. Twenty years ago, I had a digital watch from Casio that recharged itself through a small strip of solar cells mounted next to the display. Why can’t our current electronics do the same? We certainly have more efficient solar cells today—cells that can even generate electricity from indoor lighting.
Imagine if your smartphone had a strip of solar cells on the back, or even at the top, bordering the screen. It could trickle-charge your phone whenever it was out of your pocket. Mine sits on my desk most of the day. I usually carry a spare battery with me because at the end of the day, the phone is nagging for a recharge. If it could trickle-charge, that might be worth a couple more hours of service.
Why not add solar cells to a Kindle or a tablet? The Kindle has such a low power-draw that a strip of solar cells might be all the recharging it needs. Adding solar cells to a tablet might not provide a full recharge, but it could certainly extend the hours of usefulness per day.
How about solar cells on your Bluetooth or your mouse? How about solar cells on all those remote controls in front of your TV set? Trickle-charging might be enough for some devices that you’d never have to change batteries or plug in a recharger again.
Why not have batteries and solar cells on your external peripherals as well? Think about your external hard drive that connects through a USB port. Right now, it needs a cord to the wall. What if it could keep itself charged, partly through a solar cell and partly through the USB port. You could have one less cord to trip over and your external drive would be a lot more portable.
Where else could you put solar cells? The Toyota Prius has solar panels on its roof, but those only power a fan so that a parked vehicle doesn’t get too hot on sunny days. Why not also trickle-charge the car’s battery and extend its mileage?
Adding solar cells to any electronic device lessens its dependence on batteries and wall-sockets. Consider that there are a billion electronic pieces in the United States alone and the power-saving would be considerable. It would also reduce the number of batteries discarded every year.
And finally, here’s a third good little idea. One automaker is advertising a car that can be locked and unlocked from a smartphone. That’s a good start, but how about having a phone app that does a lot more? The Prius key-fob is a good example. If it’s in your pocket, the Prius senses its proximity and the car door unlocks automatically as soon as you touch the handle. Even better, you don’t even have to take the key out of your pocket to start the car—just press the On button and go. Why can’t all cars work like that?
But why have a key-fob at all? Why can’t your smartphone be the key? Why can’t it be a garage door opener too? And how about having it unlock your front door automatically so you don’t have to fumble in the dark? Ohell, it should turn on the lights automatically when you get home at night.
And while we’re at it, why not have your smart phone function as a universal remote control for your TV, your radio, your disc player, and your DVR as well? Why can’t there be an app for that?
Yes, a lot of this is going to require some integration with your Personal Very Private Network, and more than that, it’s also going to require that manufacturers agree on a standard for integrating multiple devices across the internet, but if someday every device is going to have its own IP6 web address, then we should also have one device that we can find in the dark to bind them all. (With Nazgul, an extra $139.)
None of this is impossible. The technology already exists. It just hasn’t been integrated yet. But these are the kinds of things we want our machines to do for us.
What do you think? What good little ideas would you suggest?
—————
David Gerrold is a Hugo and Nebula award-winning author. He has written more than 50 books, including "The Man Who Folded Himself" and "When HARLIE Was One," as well as hundreds of short stories and articles. His autobiographical story "The Martian Child" was the basis of the 2007 movie starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet. He has also written for television, including episodes of Star Trek, Babylon 5, Twilight Zone, and Land Of The Lost. He is best known for creating tribbles, sleestaks, and Chtorrans. In his spare time, he redesigns his website, www.gerrold.com
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Founck
December 25, 2011 at 5:53am
Has anyone ever had sex while wearing a digital watch? Just sayin...
JohnP
December 08, 2011 at 5:36pm
<Leaning in towards the Garmin GPS on the dash with a 32 GB fully loaded map micro SD chip (worth $120) in hand> "Get in there, you little sucker! There! NOOO, it popped out! Where is it?" <crunch> "Oh no! Oh Damn!"
haboh
December 08, 2011 at 4:43pm
You are wrong. Putting a camera in a cell phone was a terrible idea. Have you seen a concert or similar event lateley? No, because you can't with all the idiots holding their phones up in the air to take a photo or video from 50 years back, in the dark. You are all retarded! This must be stopped!
Asterixx
December 08, 2011 at 4:42pm
The reason for Apple not putting μSD slots in their iStuff has little to do with them wanting you to replace said stuff when you run out of room. It's more so that they can sell you more expensive iStuff right now. Witness the iPhone 4S that I just bought. My 16GB model was subsidized at $159. Had I wanted to step up to a 32GB model it would have been $259. 64GB? $369. That's a $100 step from 16 to 32, and another $110 to go from 32 to 64. Meanwhile, from the same store I bought my iPhone, you can buy 16GB Lexar μSD cards for $29, and 32GB cards for $59. Had I chosen a 64GB model I'd have paid $210 for $88 worth of memory. The memory upgrade would have cost more than the whole 16GB phone did!
By not including that μSD slot, Apple not only makes sure that you pay way too much for extra storage, but they ensure you buy that storage from them, and not, say, Lexar...
LatiosXT
December 08, 2011 at 9:31am
On solar cells and recharging...
The first step is to figure out what your voltage requirement is for that battery, which it needs to be at least the voltage that's supplied open circuit. Then you need to feed it current. And depending on how much current you feed it, you could be sitting around for a long time. And there's the fact that you're probably not going to give the device on the solar panel side enough light to make it matter.
Yes, solar is a great piece of technology. It's also horribly inefficient.
lostcause64
December 08, 2011 at 8:16am
The cheap little $40 car stereo I found at Walmart last year has the aux jack, a USB port for flash drives AND a micro SD card slot that can handle up to 16gb cards. It has no cd player, and the display can't be adjusted for brightness when driving at night, but since I can store a lot of music in 16gb at lower quality - since the player will only recognize up to 192k mp3 or wma files - I don't need cd capabilities. I can always pull the card, pop it into my laptop to modify what music it has and back in the car it goes. Works great for road trips and I don't need to listen to the same song twice in 8 hours. No commercials, no wading thru songs I don't like to get to one I do like, and no monthly fees...
Oh, and I have yet to find a card slot on any of the higher end car stereos...
Slurpy
December 07, 2011 at 10:43pm
My Panasonic TV (which I recommended to David when he was shopping for one) has an SD slot, which does let me play pictures from it. And my car stereo, a few years old JVC, has a USB port on the front that will play straight from a thumb drive. And my friend has an integrated home security/lighting systems that runs from an Android app.
Not only does this tech exist, it's already out there, you just have to look hard enough.
The Corrupted One
December 07, 2011 at 5:53pm
I like the solar panel idea.
Then you could get an extra 2-3 hours out of a charge if you place it right.
silent_sentinel
December 07, 2011 at 5:48pm
Some of the best Ideas Iv'e heard of. Implementation of these would take allmost no time.
cschwarz85
December 07, 2011 at 5:34pm
Craftsman actually has a garage door with an app for both iPhone and Android that remotly opens and closes the door.
BlazePC
December 07, 2011 at 5:31pm
David, always enjoy your work. Keep it up!
But I do know you are asking the memory slot question in a rhetorical fashion. It should be plainly obvious to most that Apple and Samsung haven't incorporated SD slots for one HUGE reason - replacement value. It's called restricted/captured market, and it sucks. That's why the smarter tablet mfg's are getting the smarter customers. Toshiba Thrive is an awesome example. Acer and Asus are smart too but the Toshiba has all the full sized ports, a serviceable battery and most importantly - A FULL SIZED SD SLOT!
Apple knows how to string people along, and you can usually get away with that type of behavior when your products are intriguing and sexy. Others have learned from them and that's why there are more and more of these incremental, baby step technology offerings. Common sense is out the window in lieu of bolstering the revenue stream it would appear. That's why when I start to hear these corporate top-dogs and politicians start talking about efficiency, saving the planet and the rest of the ballyhoo! I just laugh because they are either blatant liars or just plain stupid. Capitalism at it's best and to each his own I suppose. People just have to get smarter about buying when the aggregate in upgrades/features make sense to the personal pocket book.
Expandability so your device replacement/upgrade cycle is longer, solar power assisted operation and memory built-in to more and more devices. All makes sense David. But since when does "making sense" prevail in the human condition?
ilfipian
December 07, 2011 at 5:23pm
The Xoom had read functions since 3.2 and will now read/write if the software is properly written. Lots of it isn't yet. Outside of the US, it's been working since 3.1 but in the US, the Xoom is a Google Experience Device and is limited by what Google is doing. So no Motorola bonus drivers.
The dumb thing is that changing uSD cards interrupts the 4G driver/service forcing a reboot. You have to pull the SIM card to access the uSD slot. That was a stupid decision in engineering.
Samsung wasn't any better really. For the 16gb model, they don't offer 3G/4G and since the SD slot was there for the SIM as well, it has no uSD at all either.
brentrad
December 07, 2011 at 6:27pm
You gotta be kidding me. uSD isn't rocket science, why is Motorola having so much trouble with this? My Asus Transformer has a uSD slot that worked from day one and has no limitations I can find: plug it in, it makes an icon in the lower right (very similar to how USB devices show up in Windows), click the icon and click the folder icon that appears, and it gives you a file system to browse/copy/paste/delete/whatever. Click that icon again and click the dismount icon, and you can remove it - easy.
I mostly use the uSD slot for reviewing pictures I just took with my digital camera. Which I think is a killer feature of the Transformer. (My digital camera only takes full size SD cards, so I just use an SD-to-uSD adapter in the camera.)
ilfipian
December 07, 2011 at 7:28pm
It's the fact that it's a "Google Experience Device". They install ONLY Android with no extra tweaks to it.
Outside of the US, the uSD is as you describe on the Xoom as Motorola included the extra softwares support drivers. BUt it's not a GED outside the US. Here, we're stuck with what Google delivers. Perqs of GED are that you get updates and upgrades sooner than other devices and it's the baseline development device so tends to be stable and widely compatible with apps. I'm currently on Android 3.4 on my Xoom for example.
Most of the video playback tools and filebrowsers now support the uSD on the Xoom. But I'd like App2SD to work and I've not been successful there yet.
Ilander
December 08, 2011 at 6:30am
That would be μSD. Although, with the state of unicode, it's a complete ##### to implement. Can't wait for nano-SD cards, if only to alleviate this issue, lol.
Biceps
December 07, 2011 at 4:46pm
How about another, supplementary power-source... an inertia-powered device (like what they use in a lot of luxury watches now) that converts your body movements (or any movement) into power. Couple that with solar cells and you might add another hour or two to a cell phone.
What if, instead of glass or cheap plastic, we make cell-phone cases (or coat them in) chemicals that change heat into electricity? Your phone will always get warmer in your pocket, and will always get warmer during heavy use as the battery heats up. Using phase change materials to transfer some of that waste heat into electricity might give a little more power.... and you could also probably reverse the flow later and use your phone to cook an egg or something cool like that.
And lastly, what about adding a methane-powered fuel cell to all cell phones. If you need to fart, just fart on your phone for AN HOUR OF BEAN POWER. :) Might have to wait a few more years for this last one.
zaphodbeeblebrox 42
December 07, 2011 at 3:35pm
i put a solar panel on my kidnle 3 just need to add a diode and ill never have charge it again!
Wingzero_x
December 07, 2011 at 2:46pm
Yeah, I was in the same conumdrom, and that is why I never considered the iPad, hell just my music folder is more than the largest available iPad. However after getting the Acer Iconia I found out that without added software that USB port was useless. I also kept running into walls that just seemed to prevent me from doing what I wanted unless I nuked the system. So I returned the Iconia and got an iPad, and yes, I knew that I was still going to be confined to Apple's play ground, and I was still worried about storage space. However I soon found out that both worries were unfounded.
Welcome to 2011 where we have the cloud, and remote desktop access. With just my name and email address alone, I have access to over 64GB of free online storage. I can also access any file as well as run software on my home or work computers remotely from my iPad. Also if you wanted SD storage you could always get the Apple Camera adaptor, or even a wifi HDD!
praack
December 07, 2011 at 2:44pm
Ah memory slots- always disabled on anything that can pull content- blame it on the worry that someone will use it to copy music/video/ebooks to the SD and then give the copy to a friend
blame the millenium act on that.
like the solar panel idea though - would really decrease the battery relience and the tech is there now
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