I don't know about everyone else, but there have been times where I have found myself missing some certain functionality in smartphones.

Right, sure What else is new?

Well what I'm talking about is not just any functionality, but functionality that used to be in old smartphones, or even PDA's that was once extremely useful to me, and is now no longer available. It seems like as smartphones move forward into the future, certain things get left behind (that are still widely used technologies) because the smartphone market believes they are "antiquated". In the end, though, the consumer knows better.

Infrared: Also known as IR, this technology was in PDAs, but never really translated over to smartphones thanks to the advent of Bluetooth. However, IR can be used in several other ways besides just pairing devices, such as controlling your television, your ceiling fan, or anything that uses a remote control. I remember using my HP 111 PDA in combination with Nevo controller software to run virtually everything in my household, right from my PDA. Pretty cool, right? This is a feat that hards to accomplish with smartphones, even today, and using old technology I was able to do it in just a few minutes.

The use of Serial ports and expandable HDD slots: My old Compaq 110 PDA had an IDE-like port on it (which attached to the serial port on the bottom, and sat on the back like a kind of case) that would allow me to use my windows mobile-enabled device to browse through hard drives on the fly without needing a laptop. For any tech, this would be an extremely useful tool that I wish I could find a system for on my current Windows Phone. For someone working on computers all the time, this technology used to be indispensable. However, the advent of the SD card killed this technology.

Windows Mobile 5: I know, I know. I might get reamed out for adding this here, but there was one thing great about windows mobile: It's file system was accessible and compatible with a Windows PC. I loved being able to use my PDA as a flash drive with a readout. I never had a moment of "did I save that to my flash drive?" because I could pull it up on my PDA and check, then connect my USB cable to my PC and upload it again later, just like a flash drive. Pretty Nifty, right? Not to mention that I could download and install my own custom java applets, which can be really, really useful. Sadly, though, the virus was the killer of this technology, and the amount of times you reformat your device due to an unauthorized java applet was very high; however, the trick there was to live and learn - and back up a lot. Which I didn't mind after weighing the benefits.

Ethernet Ports: Yes, it's true. Older PDA systems actually had Ethernet ports on them. I just want one to wire my smartphone into a system. The troubleshooting possibilities are endless.

So why am I mentioning all this? Well, I've been thinking this over and I have been getting more and more tired of carrying my laptop around to troubleshoot computers every time I need to work on a network. Wouldn't it be convenient for us professionals to have a company produce a new smartphone that has the connectivity features that would be useful to us to allow us to use our mobile device for troubleshooting?

It may be just a pipedream, but I know I would buy one.