Conversing with some other mini-pc heads today I came up with this list of extra capabilities.
Speech recognition.
It takes a fair bit of CPU power to do speech recognition. I personally dont see this taking off though. Speech recognition has been around for a while on desk pc’s but I dont see a load of people really talking madly into microphones. And people certainly wont do it in social scenarios.
Built in scanner.
This could be a good one. I know of a Java aplet that allows cameraphone users to read bar coded URLS. If one could read the bar codes on food, link to a live database and get all the nutritional info somehow. Or even scan a product and see if its available somewhere else for cheaper.
Advanced scanning with OCR could be useful in certain situations but it needs a decent application before its worth having.
Projector.
Here’s one for the next 5-10 years. Built-in laser projectors. Just imagine projecting a film on the wall from your mobile! Wooh!
Games.
Games have been mentioned before but to be honest, I didnt give them the priority they deserve. A decent games-playing mini pc could potentially be good. There’s certainly a market for them but displacing the established products would be very hard.
Video telephony over IP.
Here’s one that could be good. Currenly video calls over 3G networks are very expensive. If a big voip provider started handing out mini tablets with cheap audio and video telephony contracts, it might be a way to subsidise the cost of the tablet. I like this idea a lot.
Live TV.
Live TV over DVB-H and DMB is on its way. Watching it on a nice 5″ screen will be much more fun than on a mobile. Again, there’s a way to subsidise the cost of those tablets with a DVB-H contract from your local provider. It might not have to be DVB either. Could be live TV over internet.
Again, I like this idea. Maybe it can be combined with the Video/Voice over IP solution. That would mean someone like Sky/Easynet (in the UK) being able to knock out some cheap tablet products.
I think ‘pure’ gaming consoles are edging towards carrypad convergence. You already have nice multimedia capability and even network connection on them, why not use it for other purposes as well? Consider the free Wi-Fi service, and then the Opera that’s just being introduced to the Nintendo DS.
On the carrypad side, you might not get the die-hard mobile gamers. But think convergence, your regular users will have some casual/occasional gaming wishes, and basically they would want to do ‘everything’ on the device. So games are just another sales argument in the mix. There are also some serious game types that would work fine on a carrypad…