Nick speculates about iPhone

So, I’m trying to create a list of everything I can think of that might possibly be in a phone, to speculate about the next iPhone. I’ll only be thinking about hardware or physical controls (not software).

Stuff in the iPhone 4:

• Two accelerometers
• Bluetooth
• Cellular antennas/modems
• Wifi
• Front camera
• Autofocus back camera capable of hdr
• Back camera light/flash
• Fancy high-resolution and good viewing angle screen
• Proximity sensor (detects when face is beside earpiece)
• Magnetic compas
• GPS
• Headset speaker
• Loudspeaker (mono)
• Microphone (just one?)
• Capacitive touch screen
• Dock connector allows some accessories (like component out)
• [and all kinds of fancy software]
• Sleep, home, volume buttons
• Silence switch

 

Missing?

• Thermometer?
• Camera button (shutter, and/or launch camera)
• Heart rate monitor?
• nike+ support
• A kickstand
• 3d display
• Stereo speakers
• Optical zoom lens or lens mount
• Physical keyboard
• Some magical tactile feedback (unlikely, tech would likely appear years before apple uses it)
• HDMI out
• Micro-usb
• Memory card slot (micro sd)
• Removable battery
• Larger/secondary vibrate modor?
• Physical gamepad inputs

[Is this better than not posting for months?]

On Kinect and 3rd party drivers

I think the $2000 Kinect drivers bounty presents some interesting possiblities.

I would expect the Kinect (like any modern peripheral really) has its own processor, ram, and flash onboard, intended to be updated by microsoft at a later date, and do image processing to minimize the work of the xbox.

So then I wonder…
* When you first set up a Kinect, either now or in the future, is new software installed?
* Will future versions of this software have different interfaces to your xbox?
* Will a Kinect sensor be tied to a single xbox after initial setup?

I could see this becoming a real battle with microsoft… if they want it to be. Recently microsoft has been remarkably open though (something like XBLIG simply doesn’t exist on other consoles, open sourcing f#, ironpython, ironruby, public face of asp.net mvc). Admittedly microsoft is big enough that they can be two-faced on things.

I’m not sure what they’re trying to protect here. I don’t see a huge piracy issue, but there is the potential for someone to make an unlicensed Kinect sensor… This seems unlikely to me. Also I don’t see a tremendous benefit for nintendo or sony to try to clone the Kinect or be compatible with it. At the very least doing this would imply “our offering isn’t good enough”

This will be something very interesting to watch. I expect the first step is to monitor the usb traffic. I guess I wouldn’t be much help there, I have no idea what hardware or software you’d use to do that.

Hello world!

Here we go, time to start attempting to blog again.

I will not be talking about my previous attempts nor giving excuses for why I haven’t posted often. Well, not right away.

Let the neglecting of another blog begin!