Damien Morton writes in to express his incredulity with respect to the existence the Packet PC, and makes some excellent points to support his case: “This sounds a lot like the BluePod, the fabled BlueTooth enabled iPod. Frankly, I don’t think the PacketPC exists, or will exist in the next 2 years or so.”
Damien continues:
We’ve seen the iPod go from 5 to 10 to 20 Gigs over the past few years, and it’s probably no stretch to imagination to see the iPod going to 40 and to 80 Gigs and more over the next few years.
LCD text entry screen – also no stretch of imagination.
MP3 Player – no stretch of the imagination.
GPS – again, no stretch of the imagination – but GPS tend to want colour maps, so the LCD will probably have to be colour.
So what do we have here – 60GB hard disk, colour LCD, GPS receiver, MP3 Player. Oh yeah, I forgot about the 802.11b radio modem.
60 GB disk uses 1.5W
GPS uses 0.5W
802.11b uses 1W
Small colour LCD uses maybe 0.5W
Total is maybe 3W.
The best battery technology has maybe 0.12 Watt Hours per gram, soo….. For ths thing to operate for the 9 hours that current iPods do.. It will need a 225 gram battery, about half a pound or 8 ounces. The PacketPC sounds nice, but with todays technologies it would weigh in at a pound or more.
