Ten things that need inventing

Posted by stuart as Uncategorized

I’m a lay bastard. I try to find the easy way to do everything, and something I can often be heard saying is:

Why doesn’t someone invent ………………

So I’ve come up with a list of things I think someone needs to invent. Some of these fit my criteria of making my life easier, others I think would just be damned cool:

A digital camera with bluetooth. If I can FTP the photos from my mobile phone to my laptop using bluetooth, why can’t I do the same with my digital camera? I’d gladly pay a few extra bucks for a camera that could do this. No more fiddling around with USB cables or SD cards.
On the same subect, I’d like to see a mobile phone with a decent camera. I don’t expect 7.1 megapixels or anything. The 2.0 megapixels on my Nokia 6280 is fine, I just want a camera which actually takes the picture when I press the button, not 3 seconds later when I’m putting the phone back in my pocket.
This would be a big one for me: A cigarette which doesn’t kill you. Surely in this age of DNA and Genetic Engineering, someone could GE a tobacco plant to remove all the nasty toxins. I like my smokes, but hate the fact that they’re killing me.
Either a wi-fi Internet Radio which doesn’t cost US$400, or an FM transmitter which actually works and has some range. I love my streaming radio, just hate the fact that I can only listen to it near the computer.
A decent open source online news service. I hate having to filter every newspaper / news website I read based on who owns it, and what their political agenda may be - Fox News anyone? I know this probably wouldn’t work, as political agenda would hijack it, but a man can dream, can’t he?
A 15″ LCD screen with wi-fi and a web browser embedded in it. No keyboard, except for the touch screen one you could pull up as required (Like on my PDA). Hang it on the wall, and just run your favourite news site on it, refreshing every five or so minutes. Even better, make up your own page with all your favourite feeds. Maybe even chuck a webcam on top of the screen (like in many laptops) and use it to video-conference?
Voice Over IP that actually works, so I don’t have to reboot my ATA every day after discovering that it has deregistered itself from the server.
An MP3 player with bluetooth headphones. Not one of those crappy earpieces you get for your mobile phone, but a decent, stereo set, which comes already paired to the MP3 player.
Flash memory drives which double as extra RAM. I’d love to be able to add an extra couple of Gig when I’m trying to rotate that 100Mb tiff in photoshop.

That’s all I can think of for now. Can you think of any other things that need inventing?

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