Ok, this may very well belong in suggestions, but I'll start here.

The PDA needs hotkeys that take you from the HUD to the submenus in said PDA.

For instance: I'm cruising along, I check and edit my notes. Five minutes later I'm locked in the middle of a furball with a rival guild. Mid fight I hit "u" to check the sector list quickly to see if any of his or her backup has arrived, the PDA pops up displaying my notes. Three extremely frustrated clicks later; one to get to the sector list, the next to select my target, and another to get me out of the PDA.... well, I'm dead.

Officer Barbrady says: "Move along! There's nothing to see! Move along!"

(It has been said a few times already that different hotkeys will bring up specific part of the PDA so... just wait until all the PDA stuff is in...)

A guild notes page would be nice too.. :) And an automatical log that keeps track of your kills (or you getting killed).

The best possible feature (except for the possibility to watch pron on your PDA, of course) that I can think of at this moment is to have tab with your hails. On this tab it should be possible to adjust your characters hails bound to for example the key 0-9, making it harder to accidentily hail someone with your other character's evil pierat hail.

perhaps also the ability to set which page of the pda comes up as default would be useful

capnhack, it's been implied that pressing 'u' would bring up your PDA's user list other keys would bring up other sections of the PDA ('j' for cargo hold jettison page, n for navigation Map etc).

The idea of the PDA is to group and harmonize different screens into a single interface and provide a wee bit more info while at it.

If you're correct, upper case, then I demand a keyboard shortcut, effective immediately, for the notes. I find it irritating changing to notes and then having to change to nearby ships before I close it.

Would be nice if the thing saved the ordering of the player list. Having to change that after every logon is a little anoying.

I think I'd like to be able to access the PDA from within the station. I think it would be reasonable to remove the sector list from the station version, but I would at least like to have the mission logs/notes available within the station.

if the PDA would let us write our own lua (or python or ruby) code for it, we could do a lot of this ourselves.

True. I would prefer python, I don't think it is too hard to implement some bindings for creating a new tab.