deathtrap?

humm putting a solidly mounted metal tube facing right into where you slam forward (from the back seats) in an accident would seem a bad idea. I guess it depends on how much you like the people you car pool with...

slurp - the big gulp

Humm I've got 32gb of storage on my phone, about half full atm, but I can fix that :D

full with maybe 2-3k txts - mostly of the "do you want stuff at the shops" or "I'l be there in 5" but quite a few long personal sharing, maybe a few discussing medical stuff...

1k+ photos & vids (friends with babies, dogs and cats being cute, etc)

Slurping that should keep their little device busy for a long while!

Of course if a device like this was used to archive the data on my phone - and NOT part of a criminal investigation, then I have the opportunity to assert my copyright on the contents (maybe not on most of the texts, but certainly on all photos and video)

Wonder if we can 3-strikes the entire police force off the net?

umm been there 20 yrs ago

The reason its not commonly done is because its been done and found to not be an effective use of resources. In the 80s we had add-in cards full of ram (used as a ram disk) with battery back - functionally equiv to your flash disk, without the limited write cycle problems.

What we discovered is the ram$$ was better used if it was placed in the system memory pool where it could be used as disk cache/ram disk or working storage. And we put the battery backing on the whole box.

Jen

Oh and I went back looking - here is a 2005 pci ram/disk card http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2005/05/31/gigabyte_ramdisk/1 That seems to be what you were saying wasn't invented?

firewall

But for general privacy/security what Android really needs is a firewall - including per app settings (allow/deny/allow access only to specific site). Then rather than aftre the fact wipe/recovery tools, we would have a chance to stop all the data leakage in the first place.

Better - each App has a list of features it wants permission to use - let us select which features we want it to have access to - not just "take it or leave it"! Then the app has to cope with "oh, no camera (access) or "no location data" or "no internet". They have to deal with these situations anyway (network is off, gps out of range, no on board camera, etc). So just let us tick a box tellign the app it can't use a function of our device.

wish list!

good idea?

Huge crack opens up in the sea floor off Japan... and then the wind "safely" blows the radioactive gases ... yes, you guessed it... out to sea. Now all we need is a darkened freighter/research vessel to get things rolling...

Oh yeah, old movie plots in real life!

sure - make them huge...

Between noscript, flashblock and adblock there's pretty much no chance of a (huge) ad getting to my screen. I don't block all ads - but serve up one that annoys me and the ad vendor gets added to the Blackhole list.

(hint - Flash ads, esp with sound, going to get dumped! Google style text block with links - love'em!)

don't be so quick...

There are some really interesting advances in optics and processing. Sure nokia couldn't make a camera phone that is a miniture DSLR - thats silly talk. But what about an array of 5Mp sensors each with a steerable micro lens. Lets say they cover the top third of the smart phone with these say 48 sensors over 3x3cm - do some array processing and you have an effective 3x3cm sensor.

A fluid micro lens system means you could have control on field of view (zoom) and limited directionality.

Want DOF? thats an array calculation, no problem. Want portrait quality? Use a couple sensors zoomed wide for scene and the rest zoom tight to capture fine detail on the subject area. Want high contrast? Vary the sensitivity of some of the sensors.

Sure, array/aperature calculations are rocket science - but certainly possible with fast enough chips