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An information appliance (IA) is a device that focuses on handling a particular type of information and related tasks. Typical devices could be a smartphone, PDA, and so on. The term is often confused with internet appliance, a type of consumer product which accesses services on the internet. Information appliances may overlap in definition or are sometimes referred to as smart devices, mobile devices, wireless devices, internet appliances, web appliances, handhelds, handheld devices or smart handheld devices.
History The term was coined by Jef Raskin in the early 1980s. * For a short while during the middle and late 1980s there were a few models of simple electronic typewriters fitted with screens and some form of memory storage. These devices had some of the attributes of an information appliance. One of these dedicated word processor machines, the Canon Cat, was designed by Jef Raskin as the forerunner of the idea of the information appliance. Raskin also coined the term "information appliance", and described some of its properties in his book The Humane Interface. The term and the ideas behind it were later explained in detail by Donald Norman in his book The Invisible Computer. The information appliance is the other type of device that Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, mentioned, aside from the network computer, that would take over the desktop PC. Walled gardens versus open standards In an ideal world, any true information appliance would be able to communicate with any other information appliance using open standard protocols and technologies, regardless of the maker of the software or the hardware. The communications aspects and all user interface elements would be designed together so that a user could switch seamlessly from one information appliance to another. Some vendors are attempting to create "walled gardens" of closed proprietary content for information appliances, leveraging existing proprietary technologies. However, with the exception of NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, these efforts have been less successful than predicted, due to the willingness of most vendors to work together within open standards frameworks, and the pre-existing widespread adoption of open standards such as GSM, IP, SMS and SMTP. Related concepts The idea of ubiquitous computing is related to the notion of information appliance because both take into account the need to design dedicated, interconnected devices from the ground up, by taking human factors as well as software and hardware issues into account. They differ on other matters such as the importance accorded to social aspects of computing. See also Sample devices | ||||||||
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