It is no good these days just shoving M-Office into a palm-sized slab. Expectations on intelligence are rising continuously. The current ideal machine should:

- create a slides for marketing campaign from a set of buzz-words

- connect you to a suitable producer in China

- synchronise buying and selling of your shares to the campaign

- keep you advised on the best GPS location for tax purposes

- randomly generate mobile calls to keep employees busy

Since it is the first of April, maybe I should maintain this is possible within 5 - 10 years with sufficient R&D.

[QUOTE] "the traditional PDA device has now been all but killed off by the smartphone ...

... but give Intel's researchers five to ten more years and his vision might just come to be realised ...

... so the built-in GPS and Google Maps app know exactly where you are and can feed that into your other apps. The gadget's multi-mode radio is capable of hopping from Wi-Fi to 3G or WiMax (maybe) right at the moment you leave the building, so you're connectivity's not interrupted, ensuring the route the device has planned for you - it knows you have a meeting in a hour - can be changed as soon as it learns there's a big traffic foul-up on the way.

Your PDA's already checked the weather report and told you to bring a brolly."[/QUOTE]

So Intel are basically saying they've been to the Smartphone show and liked what Nokia, SonyEricsson, Motorola, Samsung etc. have already announced and will join the party in, what, five to ten years?

"Freeway" (Symbian) gives you "hopping from Wi-Fi to 3G or WiMax", the "Location Based Services" give you GPS maps and such that interact with your calendar and can pull down current weather reports for where your plane is going to land etc.

There's very little in Intel's announcement that can't be done with smartphones now, and mostly it's just a matter of writing applications that talk to each other (easier on an open platform like Symbian or Linux, though when iPhone gets GPS and the next release of the devkit it may be easier on there too). And phone manufacturers are competing to add "killer functionality" to your handset to convince you to keep upgrading ... in five years time Intel will still be behind the curve based on this announcement. Still, competition is good :-)

It's all great stuff Intel, which is why everyone else is already doing it.

I think you'll find the first PDA was the Psion1 in 1984 NOT the Newton

Sometimes I read a feature that has me utterly confused, and I had this one written off as an April Fool. Chris O'Shea has already summarised the bizarre Orwellian marketing going on here.

Also, as AC has touched-on by questioning the lack of a mention of Psion: it really is disturbing how technology history gets re-written. The Yanks discover something the RotW has had for years, and make out they invented it. They think they invented the PDA and now they think Steve Jobs invented the smartphone. A parochial attitude and too many trips to Disney really do distort reality.

I want my Velo 900 !