Hardware Concept - One Stop Dock

Portable computing has come a long way in recent years. Where 6 years ago, our only option for portable computing was a heavy laptop computer, now we have devices that fit in our pockets that can do everything we need on the road.

However, this abundance of devices poses a possible problem. There's too many of them! I'll give an anecdote to explain further:

When I left for college, my family bought me a laptop computer, coincidentally the one I am still using today. Later during the HP fire sale, I bought a HP TouchPad tablet and flashed Android on it. I also have an Android smartphone.

Back home, I had a mid range desktop PC. While the specs are a bit dated, it still outperforms my laptop when it comes to things like 3D gaming or video editing. However, since my life at school needed portability, all of my programs, settings, and files were set up ideally on my laptop. When I came home, even in the presence of my more powerful gaming computer with the larger screen, I was still on my laptop most of the time. I only reluctantly turned my desktop on when I wanted to play a game. Talk about first world problems.

Now I propose a solution to this. One device with all settings, that can be "upgraded" at will. Basically you have your tablet or laptop computer with it's limited specs. However, since it's portable you have all of your settings on there. Sure, cloud helps to bridge this gap but it's still not really enough.

Now imagine you have the option to dock this in a setup with much higher specifications. When docked, the system would ignore the onboard specs (or combine them a la SLI or something) and gives you the full scale performance you expect from a larger more permanent computer. That would be amazing!

The dock could be configurable like a standard desktop. You would have all the ports and features you dont get from a smaller tablet or laptop. You could even do things like install stand alone drives in the computer that back up the entire OS using the built in hardware, while you use the dock's hardware to do your work / gaming.

Click to embiggen and read my musings.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine that dock now becomes a home mainframe device. You access content on your portable device from the living room TV via wifi or something. Suddenly you only need one device and some (hopefully standardized) accessories.

I know this gets kinda sketchy but, now lets go to the maximum of extravagance and wastefulness that makes America awesome. Imagine you take that main tablet with you and dock it when you get home. But WAIT! you want to watch movies on the couch and browse with it but you want to keep the tablet docked to charge / backup / someone else is using it/ etc.

There's a type of computer called a zero client device. Basically its a barebones computer that relies on a mainframe to run it's OS. Take that, apply it to a tablet (bare bones, low specs, basically running from the dock / main device combo). Now you can browse on the couch and not mess with anything else. The best part - these devices could come extremely cheap because they will be used for light activity and don't need onboard storage.

Anyways, this is what I see as the future of personal computing. It's not really Post-PC, but rather PC+. Because you know what? I LIKE a tactile keyboard and high power, and I won't be giving that up anytime soon.

Hardware Idea - Portable Laptop Printer

When I was in college, I was always paranoid about getting my term papers printed well before the due date. Many professors had a zero tolerance late policy so if your paper wasn't in her hand by 8:00am, you got a failing grade - NO EXCEPTIONS. Because my luck had a tendency to gravitate to the bad end, I always took precautions and made sure my work was printed a full 24 hours before the deadline. I always wished there was an easier way though.

I found the following diagram in a pictures folder on my external hard drive a few days ago. I apparently made this in my sophomore year of college, no doubt during a particularly boring class. I figured it belonged on this blog:

Sorry for the quality of the upload.

It's a little hard to see but the printer is a very flat, approximately laptop dimensioned printer that you could take with you alongside the laptop. I'm not exactly sure if technology has reached the point where this is practical yet, but basically the whole top would be a large black and white ink cartridge. under that would be a small stepper motor type thing for applying the ink. The whole thing would be powered by a rechargable battery which is capable of printing X number of pages between each charge. It would have the typical USB printer connection as well as a mini / micro USB cable port for connectivity. I didn't include it at the time but it might be a better idea at this point and time to include WI-FI printing / Cloud printing.

The right side of the device would have a small LCD display for messages (mainly errors). There would also be a cancel button, a resume button, and a power button.

Printing would occur in a similar fashion to a fax machine. blan paper would go in the front and be spit out the back as the completed document. Simple as that.

This would be a great product for the business person on the go. Sometimes you have last minute documents to print and are nowhere near a public printing location. This printer would be small enough and lightweight enough that you could just throw it in your laptop bag and go about your daily life. It would also be great in an office setting. It's small enough that it could be placed below a monitor on a desk and forgotten about. This is especially great for all in one type computers (iMac, HP TouchSmart, etc).

Office Example

So again, this idea depends entirely on battery technology as well as printer mechanics technology. I think it's a possibility in the near future though. I've seen some portable 3D printers, and this only needs 2 dimensions.

Only time will tell

Convoluted Network #2 - Yo Dawg...

Yo dawg, I heard you like networks, so we put Wi-Fi in yo Wi-Fi so you can connect while you connect.

No, but in all seriousness, I essentially daisychained routers for this one.

I picked up a Belkin N450DB router today and decided to make another proof of concept convoluted network. I set it up in the following way:

• Created a Wi-Fi hotspot on my Galaxy Nexus
• Connected my laptop to the hotspot via Wi-Fi
• Turned on Internet Connection Sharing in Microsoft Windows 7
• Bridged the connection between my laptop ethernet port and the Modem / WAN port on the N450
• Once the network was up and running (which it did on it's own - go Belkin!), connected my HP TouchPad (Android 4.0.x) to the network.
• Opened Chrome and proceeded to browse to a few websites.

Again, like with the first convoluted network, I didn't want to do too much stuff on the connection because I only get 2GB / month on my phone data plan. I just wanted to see if I could get this network up and running, which I did. I really gotta hand it to Belkin though. Their network setup didn't extend past "plug in the freaking cable and be happy!" It's very refreshing to see that kind of usability in technology.

Here's a pretty picture I drew with my awesome MS Paint skills to demonstrate the network. 

Check back periodically. I'll be posting more random ideas I come up with later. 

Convoluted Network #1 - Content Without Borders

So I recently picked up an awesome (albeit unpaid) internship at Belkin. While many people might just know them for their expensive surge protectors and lame iDevice cases, they have actually started making strides in the wireless arena. They have been making high end networking equipment for a while but that's starting to really take off and they're rapidly becoming a big player.

Well one of the perks of working there is that I on occasion can get some free stuff. As such, I'm going to try to do something cool with everything they give me as a way of saying "I'm incredibly thankful for this gift". I'm not plugging the company by any means, as I will admit they have their faults. I also want to make it CRYSTAL CLEAR that THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS EXPRESSED ON THIS AN ALL OTHER WEBSITES ASSOCIATED WITH MY BEING IN NO WAY REFLECT THOSE OF BELKIN INTERNATIONAL, INC OR ITS AFFILIATES.

That being said, time to geek out.

So the first items I received from them were a ScreenCast AV4 and a Powerline AV Starter Kit. The Screencast is this really awesome product that serves as a wireless HDMI bridge. The Powerline is another nifty gadget that bridges ethernet connections through the electrical wiring in your home.

What I did was the following:

• Created a wireless hotspot on my Galaxy Nexus. 
• Connected my computer to the hotspot over Wi-Fi
• Turned on Internet Connection Sharing in Microsoft Windows 7
• Shared my internet connection via my ethernet port
• Plugged from the ethernet port on my laptop to the 1st powerline adapter in my bedroom. 
• Plugged the other powerline adapter in the next room over.
• Plugged the ethernet cable from the second powerline adapter in to an XBox 360. 
• Plugged the HDMI port of the XBox in to the ScreenCast Transmitter
• Plugged the ScreenCast Receiver in to the HDTV in the living room. 
• Loaded the XBox and signed in to XBox live. 

Now I didn't do much past that because I limited to 2GB / month on my phone. I just set everything up to prove that I could. The network looked a little like the following image. 

I might be getting some more stuff soon so I will post other random configurations I come up with. Thanks again to Belkin. 

Software Idea - Google Drive Consolidation

About a week ago, Google unveiled their new cloud storage solution, aptly titled "Google Drive". All they really did was take the existing Google Docs service and add the ability for desktop syncing and allowed different file types to be uploaded. I'm pleased with the way it turned out, however I do have some desires for future versions of the software.

First off, I should discuss how Google divides storage among users. I was bored in class last week and came up with this very rough estimate for storage allocation:

• Gmail - 10Gb
• Google Drive - 5Gb
• Google Play Music - About 80Gb (Assuming 20,000 songs uploaded at aproximately 4Mb/song)
• Picasa Storage - Unlimited Pictures and Videos (1gb if over size constraints)
• YouTube - Unlimited Videos within size constraints

Total storage - 96Gb MINIMUM

This is very generous of Google and I assume that the ad revenue they make from users make these services pay for themselves. However, as an average user who has been dabbling in Chrome OS a bit, I have some concerns.

On my Windows PC, I am very anal about my file structure. I have hundreds of organized folders and subfolders that really do help increase my productivity. I feel like Google Drive should be Google's version of my obsessive compulsion. For example, here is how I have my Drive folder structure at the moment: 

Google has all of this space spread across all these different services, but in order for Chrome OS to become a true desktop replacement, people are going to want to access all of their content in ONE place. Drive should be the hub for all the content across Google services. The would not even have to redistribute the space. They could simply automatically do the file structure for users based on the services they sign up for. If a user uploads an MP3 to Drive, there will be a meter at the bottom saying "you have used # of your allowed ## songs" (similar to the bottom of the Gmail page). Though the MP3 will show on drive, it will actually be uploaded to Google Play Music (if the user puts it in the music folder and it has a specific file type). When a user clicks on a song, it would redirect them to their Google Play Music page. Similarly Videos would redirect to YouTube, Documents would open in Docs, and Emails would open in Gmail. All drive should do is give the user the ability to see what content they have submitted to Google in one dashboard location. Sharing could be managed here much easier than going between so many different service home pages. It becomes a little overwhelming.

What I would eventually like to see is Google just take the 96+ GB or whatever and give it to users as straight space. I will never EVER use 10Gb in Gmail, but I may have more than 5Gb of Documents and random files. I understand this defeats the purpose of drive, as they want people to purchase more space, but it's a nice pipe dream to consider. The best step Google could make for Drive right now is to make it the aggregate of your entire Google existence.

In addition, I realize the ability to have all uploaded files in one place may be a concern for Google in terms of piracy or corruption. I think the lists shown under the media folders (music, videos, etc) would be READ ONLY and when clicked would be directed to the particular service that deals with those files. There would have to be some sort of barrier so that if someone wanted to just upload a file for sharing and not public viewing, they would be able to download it at will. Perhaps each media folder would have a "linked" and "unlinked" subfolder. Linked files are uploaded to the respective services, while unlinked files are only available for download or viewing IF SUPPORTED, but not direct sharing (IE youtube, etc).

Thoughts? Suggestions? Leave a comment.

*UPDATE - 7/2/13* Called it. Google now merged Picasa, Drive, and Gmail storage in to one 15 GB limit. We kind of got screwed on space but at least it's cohesive now. 

Laptop Idea #1 - Touch ALL THE THINGS!

This idea has been kind of thrown around a bit lately but it is rapidly becoming necessary.

Put basically, the days of the mouse are rapidly coming to an end. Touchscreens offer so much more control over a UI than an abstract connection between a pointer and a mouse.

My "Idea" is not exactly a new proposal. I just want a re-imagining of the whole human input concept. The most obvious way to do this is with a touchscreen laptop / computer. This is most famously seen with the Asus EeePad Transformer. Android is a UI designed for finger interactions, but sometimes you need the quick tactile response of a keyboard for typing. This combines the best of both worlds and even gives you a trackpad if you are so inclined to use that. For the most part you will be using the Tablet portion of the setup, which is a 10 inch touchscreen, for all of your navigation purposes.

The cousin of the Transformer, the Asus EeePad Slider does away with the trackpad and leaves you with a spring loaded slide out keyboard and tilted touchscreen. Not the most practical thing to use in the everyday, but still a step in the right direction.

These computers are only that though, a step in the right direction. They are, for the most part, underpowered computer companions rather than replacements.

I hate to say it, but Android is NOT to be considered a FULL FEATURED desktop class operating system...YET. I feel like it will get there in a few more years but for now, people need WINDOWS.

Enter Windows 8. A new version designed with fingers in mind. All of your legacy applications work, as well as new finger based applications. It CAN work with a mouse, but it will be mainly for touch input.

Now that the operating system is there, back to the question of HARDWARE. The problem I have with tablets and smartphones is that my fingers get greasy and smudge the screen very easily. I heard that some company was designing a type of glass that was smudge proof, but until then the concept of a full sized 15+ inch laptop with a smudgey touchscreen just bothers me.

Then I saw the "BentoBox" computer concept and noticed it had a REALLY good idea. Touch screen for a mouse pad. The smudges on this would not interfere with screen visibility and it has far more uses than a multi-touch trackpad. It could be used to display information in a certain "non mouse mode" and while in "mouse mode" could display static information, such as a clock, weather, network connectivity, stocks, sports scores, etc. A secondary mode could use the track pad as a quicklaunch toolbox, small secondary screen for additional settings, etc. There could be many modes all toggled by a hardware key.

Once technology creates the finger-proof glass, why not have BOTH. Or you could save space and make just one touch screen. I admit traditional mice come in handy for small or detail-oriented work, so maybe some way to incorporate both would work. Maybe have a "pro" model with a touchscreen and a trackpad, and a "basic" model which is a smaller model with just a screen and keyboard. Either way works and makes use of the touchscreen technology available these days.

Again, this is not a NEW or NOVEL idea by any means. I was just using the dying trackpad on my Dell Inspiron 1525 and thought "this is bullcrap, it's 2012, why are we still using this"

So to recap
- I like hardware keyboards. Chiclet, mechanical or other, a hardware keyboard is the best way to go.
- Touch screens are very useful for broad navigation. They should be included as a tool for the majority of navigation
- for small or detail-oriented work, a traditional mouse would be good. maybe include a sort of touchscreen trackpad

Here's my VERY rough and untalented mock up in MS Paint. Enjoy