Wireless devices for the home

From akihabara news: Location Free TV on PSP.

Which reminded me of an idea that "mobile" (as in mobile device) can mean just "mobile inside the home" rather than mobile everywhere. A device designed according to this would have a much more focused purpose, and fewer technical constraints: it can be much larger, battery life is not such an issue, WiFi instead of cellular, etc. It can even serve decorative/ambient display purposes.

It would be especially suited for home entertainment systems where everything seems to be getting more virtual (see above PSP link). Leave storage to the Mac Mini in the corner, and output to your TV/stereo, but allow control and browsing from a device large enough to actually list tracks/playlists/etc. Sonos already has something like this.

And hey, if the screen is big enough, put a browser on it too. And email. And IM. But don't turn it into a tablet PC!!!

This is something that's missing from Apple's music universe. They should make on of these, and Om Malik hints that they will, but for some reason all the excitement is about using it to download tunes in Starbucks...

The Nokia 770 should be mentioned here too - if it's the same size as the 7710 it may be smaller than I had in mind. Check www.maemo.org for some interesting stuff happening for the 770, the maemo platform, and the Hildon UI.