Challenges of mobile devices
© Anne Kellerman
After we as educators get over our euphoria, we soon come to realize several unpleasantries associated with these ever popular devices. Mobile devices have the inherent problems of small keyboards, small screens, and short battery life. The first and second problems are solvable by speech recognition and heads-up displays. Batteries need technological breakthroughs. We recently had a student prepare some content for his mobile device to take with him to Alaska to study while on vacation, only to confront this very real battery dilemma
Corporations shortsightedly cripple devices in order to force users to use only the corporations' own products. That is, they are willing to reduce the size of the whole pie, in order to get a larger slice of the smaller pie. For example, Verizon disabled Bluetooth transfers of image files from its fanciest cellphone-camera to PCs. Worse, it is said to be working on "fixing" sneakernet transfer, which transfers image files by physically moving the cellphone's SD card to a PC. We especially did not like this because we had visions of K-6 students actually taking pictures on nature field trips and then easily, wirelessly transferring these pictures to a PC for further use in building PowerPoint presentation stories.
Corporations also shortsightedly try to answer the question of whether users want to carry a single multiple-purpose device or carry many special-purpose devices. Providers let artificial distinctions reduce functions that customers can perform. PDAs traditionally lack hard drives, for no particular reason, so devices that have hard drives are forced to become restricted-function devices. Examples are portable music players such as iPod and the several Portable Media Centers.
Microsoft's msvidedodownload.com site (using cinemanow.com) offers movies for download that can be played only on $450 Portable Media Player (PMP) devices only. The movies will not play on the PC that downloads them or on a PDA (such as our Dell Axim X30) even though it runs Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system and Windows Media Player 10. Being similarly short-sighted, Microsoft insists that a PMP must be useful only for playing media and cannot perform any PDA functions or run any user-supplied application programs. They are not thinking of students. The only operating system that can prepare movies for the PMP is Windows Media Center Edition, which is sold only with dedicated hardware: You cannot buy that OS to run on an existing PC.
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