Transferring and Annotating

[rogue_ronin]

Any of you wise folks have knowledge of hardware/software/devices that support direct transfer between devices, à la Palm beaming?

It seems to me that this would be darn useful. ie: working in a meeting, sharing notes, cooperating on a project, etc. Transferring vCards or iCals, sending a sketch. Maybe there's already a "standard" developed somewhere, using IR or Bluetooth or wi-fi for transparent local communication?

Doesn't the OLPC do something like this? A kind of ad-hoc local web?

As you can see, I'm seeing the devices as somewhat more than passive readers, but not to the level of full tablet computers or laptops. Sort of like an ePad, or some such. I really think that when people start to push it to gaming/multimedia, etc. the focus is lost, and the practicality of the tool gets eroded. And the hardware demands get too expensive. I can see no good reason not to have access to my calendar, my notes, my books and my (textual) research in one device like this. Right now I feel spread all over the web, and four devices (minimum.)

I think Palm got that part 100% right (among many other things) -- the relative ease of "pushing" content onto someone else's handheld was awesome. The limits of the Palm hardware and software/formats are no longer necessary now, there's been a lot of improvement. I just don't see anyone thinking like this anymore. It's all online bookstores and web-content, blogging with your phone... (Nothing wrong with those, just think it misses the pragmatic possibilities of the form/function.) I could just be not seeing it somewhere though, so I ask y'all.

I guess I'm thinking like this: Calendar (alarms), Contacts, To-Do (alarms), Notepad, Hierarchical Organizer (Clippings), Document and eBook Reader(s), Drawing Tool(s), Picture Viewer, Collaborative Whiteboard. Are there any basic tools I'm missing? Note that I think you ought to do blog-posting, media-editing, presentation-making, gaming and other processor/web/graphics-intense things on your laptop. And you ought to communicate with your phone. But something to carry around with you that's legible, something to read, edit and share documents...

All the above presumes touch-screen, tablet. And it presumes the need for a local (as opposed to world-wide) web.

Wish I had the money or the knowledge to make it happen myself. Maybe a severely stripped OS on a Smart Q7? Still need an open framework for collaborating that is transparently extant. You should never need to configure such things, it should "just work".

Thanks for your thoughts,

m a r