> Hmm. It would be nice if we could extend the smartphone's hardware capabilities...
on a more serious note, I'd love to see more widespread generic HW and SW agnostic GPIO/DAQ standard. HW agnostic meaning that you could make your own boards with whatever MCU you prefer, and interface it with whatever. SW agnostic so that it would work with Windows, Linux, Android, OSX, iOS etc painlessly.
I don't think there is any reason the current crop of consumer-grade MCUs couldn't do that. An adapter cable for the differing pin layouts (you're never going to get everyone to agree to the same footprint). On the PC side, they are almost all running the FTDI chip, with a driver that simulates the device as an RS232 serial port. So at that point it's really just making sure the data is standardized.
Hell, most of the devices have support for inter-platform RS232. You should be able to communicate between an Arduino and an MSP430 via RS232 (you might need some resistors in the middle, because I think one runs 1.7v hotter than the other).
The hardware situation is fragmented because I think people want the one-device-one-shield model. I don't think they want to deal with daughter boards dangling from adapter cables. The majority of users for these systems are either hardware novices or hardware-and-software novices. Most of the electrical engineers I know steer a wide birth away from them. And once they get invested in a platform like Arduino, jumping over to something like TI MSP430 is an effort that is at least as significant of an effort from where they started, while providing only a limited, non-obvious benefit (in that MSP430s are cheeeeaaaap).
on a more serious note, I'd love to see more widespread generic HW and SW agnostic GPIO/DAQ standard. HW agnostic meaning that you could make your own boards with whatever MCU you prefer, and interface it with whatever. SW agnostic so that it would work with Windows, Linux, Android, OSX, iOS etc painlessly.