I'd like to be able to add any RSS feed to the store. I tried choosing some feeds from New Scientist and drag-n-dropping their URL to the RSS feed list, but nothing happened. Didn't expect it to work, but I thought it was worth a try.
Personally, I'd prefer
access to content instead of content, but that's off-topic.
I think that being able to download today's news would be good, so maybe they could add newspapers to it. (However, I think RSS feeds would actually fulfill that need.) It would be neat if your local newspaper could create it's own RSS feed, by choosing important AP/Reuters/UPI articles, then creating their own content (local news and editorials, classifieds, etc.) and setting up their own RSS feed to include their local content. You could then use the Sony Connect store to subscribe to your local RSS'ed newspaper.
(There's my back-of-the-envelope sketch for tomorrow's newspaper. Give me credit if you market my idea.
)
As for other content, I'd be interested in science magazines, journals, and periodicals.
Local weather forcasts would be cool, too.
Heck, even being able to port a daily download of my e-mail to the Reader would be a benefit.
The downside of the Reader is not being able to get instant updates. That could be covered by adding WiFi to the next hardware version, but that might not be a good idea, since WiFi on such a device would be a power hog--it certainly is on my Palm OS PDA.
I can think of some other location-specific stuff (flea market alerts, restaurant menus, yellow pages, white pages) but they would be better suited to a GPS-enabled device.
Maps would be cool, but I would make them out of vector graphics instead of JPEGs. Then, the Reader would need a vector graphics interpreter, like PostScript, so that's not currently feasible.
That's everything I can dredge off the top of my head for now. (How's
that for a mixed metaphor.
)
-William