An article at Gizmodo talks about the fake iPod shown to the right. They provide a link to the full size ‘ad’ image too which includes a spec. While this is clearly a joke, I would have changed a few things to make this more realistic:

• Drop the Dragonball CPU in favour of a high speed ARM or XScale CPU, perhaps with Jazelle Java acceleration technology built in.
• With such large hard drive, there’s no need to have so much flash, but at least 256MB of RAM would be handy. Perhaps even more.
• For wireless support, include 802.11n Wi-Fi or even WiMax for always-on wireless access (at least in metro areas, where one or both of these technologies might be used to light up a whole city).
• Add USB host support to get the photos off my camera and on to that HD while I’m travelling. Better still support for doing this over a wireless link, but that requires my camera supporting Wi-Fi or Bluetooth – and the one I have now doesn’t have either option 🙁

They are spot on with the OS though. There is no reason at all, at least not once you move to a real CPU, to have a port of the BSD/Mach based Mac OS X on a handheld device like this. I run the Familiar distribution of Linux on my iPaq which has a much lower spec than even today’s PDAs and it works just fine. NetBSD proves that BSD can be ported to many platforms (they claim more than Linux, though that must be getting close now). Why not have Mac OS X on a handheld?

[If folks over at Apple are reading and like the idea, perhaps I could do the port for you – I have been porting operating systems to embedded platforms for much of my career!]