The original Palm Pilot had no file system. There were databases, which you could open and read/write records to/from. I feel it worked pretty well, but soon newer devices came out with so much more ram that it devolved into unusably long lists of databases.<p>Current filesystems and their hierarchical folder structures give an easy-to-understand layer of abstraction without a whole lot of complications.<p>For improvements on the hierarchical part, the expansive list of filesystems using FUSE (<a href="http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/fuse/index.php?title=FileSystems" rel="nofollow">http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/fuse/index.php?title=F...</a>) has some interesting filesystems.<p>Maybe the author can find some likable ideas there?