My academic interest is gadget technology. Someone may doubt whether gadget technology should be regarded as academic interest. I would like to note here that my interest in gadget technology is not mainly focus on technology advancement. Instead, I enjoy learning many things from this matter, including personal philosophy, history, business perspective as well as influences towards society. Here, I would like to relate this issue to academic aspect. This week, the news of technology that hits every media worldwide is nothing but news of unveiling of iPad 2, as reported by BBC news, "iPad tablet launched by Apple's Steve Jobs".
Apple chief executive Steve Jobs came back from medical leave to unveil a new version of the iPad, the promising tablet device that is expected to replace PCs in the near future. "We think 2011 is clearly going to be the Year of iPad 2," said Steve Jobs. The iPad 2 is thinner, lighter than the original version released last year and it was also claimed that it is dramatically faster due to the "A5 chip". The new iPad features front and back cameras for photography, movie-recoding and video chat. Besides the improved hardware, The iPad 2 offers "iMovie" video editing software, "GarageBand" music making suite and "Hot Spot" software that lets tablets access the Internet by synching wirelessly to iPhone smartphones.
Tablet PCs have been developed for more than a decade. But until Apple came out with its little iPad, this technology became to hit technological consumer as it is really practical for information consuming. Of course, tablets like the iPad are useful for consuming information, but I don’t think it is useful for creative process. Having tried using an iPad of my friend, I cannot deny that it is a great device for consuming media as well as information with much pleasure. But, if compared with laptops or PCs, it is not convenient for producing information or high quality sources of knowledge that require mouse, keyboard, more space of storage, and higher performance processor to manipulate them. That could be referred that the more people using the tablets there are, the less they are likely to produce documents, reports, news, and any information that we would like to be informed. I agree that blogging or commenting about certain issues on the net allow us think creatively and promote our thinking process for some extend, but if people post them by tablets, almost of that writing are less likely to be serious stories or good quality essays. It is because writing something on visual keyboard on tablets is not as convenient as doing that on a real keyboard of a PC. Thus, as this technology is becoming popular for our daily life, we will slightly be becoming information consumers rather than creators. Of course, tablet technology can offer us a lot of enjoyment, and I cannot deny its advantages of following updates, but how it is useful if, in the future, our young generation have only nonsense comments, not academic article to read.
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I agree with Berm that iPads are neat, but I'm not sure how useful they would be for producing serious work. I've owned notebooks in the past, and found them so inconvenient to use when compared with my desktop PC that I gave up them. Now, I just have a nice Dell PC with a 24 inch monitor.
ReplyDeleteIf the iPad came with a foldout, high quality 24 inch monitor and a solid, full sized keyboard, I would be more interested, but then it might not be an iPad.
Obviously, a lot of people disagree with me, and many also find notebooks very useful for what they want in a computer, but I'm not rushing out to buy an iPad just yet. Perhaps when machine's can understand ENglish with native speaker fluency so that a keyboard is irrelevant, I'll have a second look at them. (And perhaps then I won't be any more necessary than the keyboard).