In the core it needs:

Wifi, 3G, very basic functions.

In the shells I want:

* Basic phone for one
* Smartphone
* Laptop/UMPC style thing.

If it’s something they can make communicate well with extra processing power in these other shells – then I could see that working well.

I’d love to have a device I can scale up or down in terms of size and capability depending on what i’m doing. It also means i’d never have to worry about syncing anything – there is stuff I have on my computers I definitely don’t want “in the cloud” per se and this way… I can make sure its still available on whatever i’m carrying at the time.

That being said, I think the idea of an alarm clock or similar thing is a bit of a farce.
It would be better to have it communicate with such a device over bluetooth or whatever. Then it doesn’t have to be physically disconnected from whatever other device i’m using it in just to use a more specific (though more restrictive) function.