Environment Aware Software & Hardware Applications

Laptops that can auto detect neighboring Bluetooth or WiFi enabled devices and can prompt users to communicate w/ them by automatically discovering their services or information... Such capabilities when built-in these devices will provide a very good  type of free communications... However, this can only be done if:

1) Mobile devices including laptops and PDAs have built-in basic communication applications such as bluetooth chat, wifi chat etc similar to NET SEND protocol in DOS which allows user to send a message to the other computers. Today, these basic applications are not present in all types of hardware and rely only on different operating systems or applications to support them. This scenario brings a world of non-standard applications making it difficult to harness the potential of short-range communications via bluetooth or WiFi.

2) Computing devices have basic senses such as sense of sight (now possible with built-in webcams), sense of touch (now possible w/ finger print scanners on some latest laptops),  sense of smell (is it possible now???) etc. When these computing devices can use their electronic senses to determine the environment it's operating on combined with the intelligent and environment-aware software applications, these mobile computing devices will be of more help in giving the users the needed info or functions automatically. Voice recognition will also play a key role in the future software applications eliminating the need for keyboards. Microsoft's new technology called Microsoft Surface is now one of the interesting type of electronic appliances that will come to the market soon. These computers are sensitive to touch but not just touchscreen but it can be a computer installed in your wall or in your office table responding to hand touches instead of mouse pointers.