Five Tech Things I Want

We've come so far these days in the world of personal technology but in some ways, we're still missing the mark. Sure it's the middle of summer but here are five things I'd like to see on the market this (or any) holiday season:All day battery life – You'd think at this point this would be a no-brainer. I want my laptop to have the same battery attributes as my phone. Namely, I want it to get to through my longest and hardest working day or two days of casual use. I also want it to do so without the need of an battery the size of something that belongs in my car and doesn't totally ruin the whole aesthetics of the laptop. Is this that hard? Note, I want real world use. That means the screen lit up brightly, wireless options on and someone actually using the machine. No faux benchmarking tests that don't bear any resemblance to real world use please.A Great Star Trek game – Come one. How hard could this be? Star Trek and PCs should have yielded something by now. Why are there no great Star Trek games? Sure, we've come close a few times, most notably with the late, great, Bridge Commander but why is it so hard to create a faithful simulation of commanding the Starship Enterprise?Updated versions of X-Wing and Tie Fighter – Lest you think I'm some kind of Trekkie fanboi, I also want the return of LucasArts' X-Wing and Tie Fighter. Unlike the Trek franchise, these were fantastic titles that totally captured the spirit and feel of the movies and were some of the best games of all time. Except try to play one under one of today's "modern" operating systems. It's time for updated versions that can use today's PC horsepower and graphics; that could take amazing game play and make it indistinguishable from the movie. Red Five is standing by.Alternative OS to Mac OS/Windows/Linux – I want something more than what we currently have, which are all essentially derivatives of the stuff that was designed more than thirty years ago at Xerox PARC. It's all the same metaphor of Windows/Mice/Icons and hierarchical storage that does its best to replicate the old file cabinets I have stored in the basement. Newton OS was truly different from anything that had come along prior, but never had the chance to mature. After all these years, can't we possibly do something a little better and a bit more interesting and functional? Note, Google's Chrome OS isn't what I'm looking for. Conceptually, that's a step backward as far as I'm concerned to the green screen architecture of the 1970s.A Really Cool digital watch – Digital watches are great. They're far more accurate than any analog watch. (the cheapest Timex will keep better time than the most expensive Rolex) but somewhere along the line digital watches got really boring. We used to see amazing, cool designs from companies like Seiko and even Casio. Sadly, choices today are limited to the most basic utilitarian stuff at the low end of the line or a bunch of boring versions of models that haven't changed in their functionality since 1980. There were a lot of cool experiments with watch technology from Microsoft with their Smart Personal Object Technology and Fossil with their late, great Palm watch. It's time for something cool to strap on my wrist once more that can do more than just tell time. Two-Way Wrist TV and Phone anyone?

That's my tech wish list. What are the five things you'd most like to see?