the Tricorder project

we all know, startrek was an series in a time,without handys, tablets and so on...
now we understand more than ever before and if you would show an smartphone anyone who was in this time where startrek was in television, he wouldn't understand what this is an how it works.

the point is, in startrek it was many cool concepts, but in real all is difficult to the startrek universe.
look at the usercontrolpanels, they have touchscreen, and cool colorfull buttons.
now in this time we also have this touch-technology but the user-interface-concept is better than in startrek, they was all static and without an keyboard.

and so what i mean, what would be, if the tricorder also is different to the startrek-tricorder.
i mean, we all got smartphones with many apps of all what we need.

i think "tricorder" dosnt mean any complete device, but it means an sensorphalance.
in the market you can buy really small bluetooth Multi-IO Cards an so you can integrate all sensors in an "Tricorder-Device" but it have no own touchscreen or cpu with sd-card, but it can be connected to your own smartphone. and then the tricorderapp can handle all sensors.

if you combine this point with an handycase, you can plug on your tricorder to your smartphone.
the connectivity can realized with NFC or Bluetooth.
all this would be make your tricorder smaller and you have instant an market for this devices.

i have seen in japan any guys also build this for measurement of radioactivity of the areas around fukushima.

I think that this is a very good idea. If one were to actually take the part of the tricorder that did the thinking out of the tricorder itself, you would be left with more room for batteries, more sensors, as well as possibly make it smaller.

This would basically allow you to do some "Cloud computing", only on a very local scale. Your iPhone, tablet, pc, etc could do the heavy lifting while all the tricorder would do is collect and either store the data locally, or ship it off via wifi / bluetooth to a more powerful processor. This could let you do things that would be simply too complex for a smaller processor to do in a reasonable amount of time. For example, 3D imaging or image / facial recognition would be more feasible with more powerful processors.