It's a PDA? a laptop? No! It's TUG (THE ultimate gadget)

PDA, checked.
Cell phone, checked.
Laptop, checked.
Digital Camera, checked.
DV, checked.
MP3 player, checked.

That's what any typical gadget freak would do before (s)he goes on a trip. (That's what an Xtreme-freak would do when going to grocery shopping :P)

Wouldn't it be great when some day we could have an ALL-in-one device that combined the functionalities of all of the above? That's what I'd call the Universal Gadget (TUG), or THE ultimate gadget :D.

THE industry calls this convergence. Right now we have seen:
- PDA x Cell phone x Camera x MP3, e.g. Treo 600
- Laptop x Camera x MP3, e.g. Sony VAIO TR-series
- DC x DV, e.g. a lot of DV could take megapixel+ (up to 3.3) still these day
- DC x DV x MP3, e.g. Panasonic D-Snap SV-AV50S
etc.

Unfortunately, you need to sacrifice a lot of quality/performance on some (or ALL) functions in any multi-fuctional units. Not to mention a lot of money too!

I believe a TUG, with reasonable quality/performance in ALL areas, will appear in the next few years. Here is my minimum requirement/spec:
- 3 Megapixel camera
- 10x optical zoom
- Over megapixel CCD sensor for video
- record directly to HD in DV format (not mpeg2! don't want inter-frame dependency!)
- 80 Gb HD (enough for a couple hours of DV, music, still photo, movies for entertainment, games, combined. Oh yeah, the OS and PIM app too)
- 7" tablet-type screen. (No integrated keyboard)
- Running the same version of OS as my desktop with instant-on capability
- Integrated messenger application that combines voice mail/email/SMS/MMS/voice call/IM/video call in a seemless fashion.
- ability to connect to 3G phone network
- WIFI and auto-switch to 3G phone network when WIFI is unavailable.
- 6 full hour of battery life (per battery) with WIFI and bluetooth on.
- less than 3 lbs.

Periphreal for the UG would include:
- Blu-ray optical read-write drive with 13+ Gb capacity on single disk (in case I fill up the 80Gb during my trip)
- Bluetooth stereo (or multi-channel :P) headphone + mic

It would look like this (but less thick and bigger screen):

(Yeah, it's a Sharp ViewCam)

Alright, enough day dreaming!