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Yes on something that will read stuff to me! Linux has Festival, which unfortunately sucks compared to what Windows has for the same thing, but it is better than nothing.

My dream for the future is a tablet that I can talk to so I don't have to handwrite at all -- something with Dragon NaturallySpeaking accuracy!

We also need an app like Kdissert (a linux app that does memory mapping -- aka, helps make and take notes) or VYM, which does the same, or Brainstorm in Windows that does something similar.

The chess app isn't very good because it doesn't let you play both sides of the game, which is what you would want to do for chess study.

It would sure be nice if someone would sell a decent camera to make part of the N800 as a replacement for what we have.

Well, I suppose that you can use flite (festival-lite) to read any TXT document, and it works for me.

Shame only open to US residents...

I would love a GPS "swarm" application that uploaded aggregate tracking data for everybody who ran that application on their N800. It could then use the aggregate data to show average traffic speeds everywhere the application was in use.

By extension, you'd know where the traffic spots were because you'd see the places where the "swarm" was stuck.

Of course, you'd need a decent install base for this to work, and you'd have to remain online the whole time.

Roger: flite was ported to the 770 and it does text to speech. If you saved the webpage as text and ran it from the commandline you could do it.

So it'd be like most other linux apps, fatty neckbeard gets it running from the commandline and leaves it alone instead of developing a GUI and making it useful.

Um, I didn't say you have to create a whole new TTS engine. A widget that let you engage Flite from within FBReader or Opera is what's needed.

And is it something that can be finished by Feb 27? Well, that's why I'm not suggesting something too big to bite off.

Reading through the rules, it looks like the PopSci folks want ideas, not implementations. They require an essay to be submitted, not source code and not anything like a ".deb" file.

-F

BTW: We should post entries here -- on ITT -- so that enterprising third-party developers can benefit from ideas just like Nokia can. As I see it, this contest is basically Nokia fishing for cool ideas to build for the Internet tablet platform. So why not share ideas with everyone?

There might be some legal problems with posting the essays -- they become Nokia's legal property once submitted. The intellectual property of the idea remains with the submitter, however (at least in my reading of the rules), so posting here in some form would be legal...and very cool.

Folks might want to way until after the submitting deadline...maybe...

-F

Well, since I'm not a US resident I might as well post my idea here.

In order for an idea to be really succesfull you need it to be either brilliant on its own for users or interesting commercially for companies - preferably both, if you want to attain both user and industry support. So my guess at the 'killer-app' of Nokia Internet Tablets (of any flavor) would be a localization service using a GPS device. The point is to make a localized database of information - something like a navigation Points-Of-Interest database on steriods. That is, companies could put geographically oriented information into a database, and the tablet would pick the relevant data out of the database depending on where you are and put it on a map of your current location. Examples:

- Nearest place to eat, including real-time updated menu of the day
- Nearest gas station(s) - including prices
- Nearest bus stops and train stations with schedules
- In Denmark we have a great system, run by the train/bus companies where you just put in your start and end address and it finds the fastest way by public transport between them, and prints an itinerary. This works from a national level all the way down to just-round-the-corner.
- The sky is the limit...

Of course users would subscribe to either individual content-providers (could be the cafe with their menu, could be someone having a lot of POIs for comparison - maybe a newspaper's food review section) or to specified keywords. You could set a limit on the number of keywords each content-provider could specify to avoid commercial spamming, and include users' reviews on content-providers so you know what other people think of the content-providers before you sign up for it. In that way only well-behaving content-providers get exposure - sort of a Digg concept. Also, advertisements can be targeted to opt-in'ers as well as geographically. And before people start screaming "Popup-monger, go jump off a cliff", I would like to point out that not all advertisement is bad. Google's advertisements on the 'net is, in my opinion, very unobtrusive, and targeted advertisement is better than random Viagra ads, as long as they don't pose a privacy risk. The privacy issues are fairly easily handled by allowing the user to choose what to subscribe to and implement it by just fetching this data from the database, without telling the database what the criteria are. Basically, only the Tablet would know what my subscriptions are.

In order to release this from the a specific platform, it should really just be a smart web service platform with the ability to take GPS coordinates as an input. You could make different views for this data - ie. dedicated Maemo software, a website, Windows Mobile or Symbian software (yuck?), all connecting to the database by some standardized protocol.

The only reason this is not already everywhere, is that no device has existed that made this easily accessible. The Internet tablets change this, as I am sure all the rip-offs coming up will also.

Now what I would really like is an N800 with a built-in GPS chip and antenna, but for now, a BT GPS reciever in my pocket would do well enough.