Do you wish we had palmtops instead of smartphones?

Warning: Very rambly.

Even with freedom issues aside, I still hate the class of device we call "smartphones". I remember I could forget to charge my Nokia phone for 3 days and it was fine and now, people concerned about battery life need an external charger and the devices are incompatible with legacy software and the software that is compatible with is bloated stuff that runs in evil Javascript and the games for those phones are sold for people with a regressive mobile gaming culture of apathy for micro-transactions and lack of collectability. (not to mention non-free DRM) At least software for Palm PDAs came on a CD that you could sync to your PDA, so you didn't even need internet and it was collectable and archivable and therefore reverse-enginneerable, there were so many iPod (non-touch) games that are lost to time because of DRM, so you can't even reverse-engineer them.

A plamtop was a class of device that pretty much had a full fledged PC by standards of 10 years prior that could fit in your pocket. The closest thing to that would be offerings from GPD, but there's one problem, our modern CPUs are way more power hungry, so you can't have a pocket machine as fast as a 2010 i7 in your pocket and have it run on AA Batteries and the battery life would be measured in weeks, not hours like what was true for the HP 200LX. The HP 200LX with it's 186-class NEC V30 was still relevant in 1992, it came bundled with Lotus 1-2-3 v2.4 in the ROM, it ran DOS, so you could even the latest business software for DOS at that time, it was compatible with the last DOS versions of Word and Wordstar and you could use it as a 186 cga gameboy and run sim city on it and there are people that still use their 200LX to this day and use the IR Port to control LED bulbs.

I would much like a re-imagination of a 90's Palmtop and ideally libre friendly while still being Wintel compatible and I wish there were mobile computing devices that draw as much power as that or less while using more advanced batteries. Some new screens take less power than screens from the early 2000's like an IPS backlit screen takes less power than A Gameboy Advance, but on the same token, 1-bit Nokia 5110 Screens take up less power than OLED, so display technology is a trade-off depending on the application and resolution.

As for the screen, my minimalist standard would be a 2:1 1920x960 because you can have an integer scale of 640x480 (1280x960) on one side with a 640x960 side pane so you could play a libre game (though respect the freedom of others to choose) on one side and have widgets or IRC on the side pane or run the game fullscreen and the technology would be a hybrid, a transflective layer for LCD viewing in sunlight with the LCD layer at least 2 bits per RGB channel with dithering and between the LCD and transflective layer, there would be a OLED layer that would be for true color when you want to spend the battery life and the top layer would be transparent ePaper for low refresh content like reading.

As for computational performance, I think currently, you could probably get something in the ballpark of quad Pentium III 450 with SSE3 support from the reference of Atom Z500 that was rated for a .65w tdp at 45nm and assuming that would scale to the same feature on current nodes, it would run for 120 hours on full blast on 2.4 watt-hour batteries and if we could go down for just two more nodes, I'd like it to be a quad core and I like the novelty of having a 90's quad socket server that can be powered by AA Batteries and it doesn't sound like much, but it's a step up from the Freescale "Dragonball" PDAs and it would be able to play Music via FLAC or HE-AACv2 and it would have to run optimized software for it instead of bloated web browsers. Also assuming, we can get more exotic semi-conductors, we could start doing some really fun stuff, assuming you can get at least 10x performance per watt, it could not only watch and edit HD Video, but also decode a 1.2kbps podcast using LPCNet because it would be above the 6 Gflops needed to decode

The LPCNet decoding would be great for use with an alternate internet infrastructure, I feel the internet isn't something that comes from the palm of your hands, it should be like a telephone land line and when I'm out and about, I don't want to be tracked by people that I don't trust because they don't trust me. So I'd like there to be more 1-way communications for wireless like how pagers work, like you could subscribe to podcasts or to a Mastodon feed and you could have your computer send those encrypted packets to your local pager firm and it would send it to your pager number that would be your palmtop assuming you were in the same radio tower area and delegate the 4G bands to more OTA TV using more advanced codecs to squeeze more efficiency and the 2.75G EDGE bands should be resurrected for people that want reliable low power 2-way communication and instead of 5G or Big Cable, we should have a mesh network of interconnected home rackmount switches where everybody lays conduit and has wireless access points all over their property and line of sight laser modems bolted to their roofs. So, Telecommunications should either be common 1-way, personal encrypted 1-way, 2.75G Edge or a giant W/LAN of which common community access points would make 5G redundant. We could go back to the days of BBSes, but with higher bandwidth. I also feel information should have the option to be distributed optically. Like Sony's 500GB Archival Disc, but double sided in a 12-disc cartridge kinda like a high end car 12-disc CD Changer and have 12TB of long term data storage per cartridge, so you could buy cartridges of git dumps, software repos, wikis, whitepapers, books, etc. Maybe smaller discs like the "business card CD" that held 1/14th the capacity of a normal CD and an Archival Disc in that interesting form-factor would hold 35GB, more than plenty for Quadrophonic mastered lossless music and good to replace DVD boxsets for the content that only exists in SD or for an independent game, I've seen some libre game devs that make Gameboy games and sell cartridges on itch. There are also protein coated discs in the works that's said they could support up to 50TB per disc, (assuming that's single sided) that could be 1.2PB per cartridge, more than enough to host mirrors.

I like the internet from a 90's perspective that was "hey, it's cool to chat with people on IRC, but other than that, I can live without it". It shouldn't be centralized, it shouldn't be bloated and we should have ways of acquiring information outside of it like we did before our lives grew dependency on it. I also like the data hoarder mentality of "You don't need fast internet if you already downloaded most of the internet that you care about".

I feel sometimes the future is in the past and sometimes the best way to move forward is re-explore things and re-blend them with the lessons we learned.