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David,
Cool! Another Java developer! And an interesting looking site at that! I'll definitely give it a look later today.
The cameraphone OCR idea sounds interesting. Not having experimented with OCR too much, I wonder whether OCR would have difficulty capturing text with various lighting levels and foreground and background colors. I'm not sure that this would've occurred to me without the mention of vehicle VINs that, at least in the States, always appear on the dash of a vehicle in the form of a black metal plate with black text.
I'm still not sure how to feel about voice recognition--especially because it is somewhat limited to quiet locales lacking ambient noise. In isolation, voice recognation would almost certainly operate better in the traditional sense of executing operations or taking dictation on the user's behalf. However, I don't see it performing well in socially crowded settings. For instance, my Toyota Prius' navigation system becomes easily confused when someone else speaks while I'm issuing it a voice command.
On the flip side, I wonder if ambient noise itself could be repurposed as a legitimate input. Remove the "voice" from "voice recognition" and add "auditory". With a quality (and durable) microphone, perhaps a PDA could reliably distinguish one or more speakers. Even in the absence of VR, this would provide a sensory input allowing for a guess of the number of individuals proximate to the PDA.
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