The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Laptop sales are raging in North America with many companies now selling more laptop machines then desktops. We want to haul all of our stuff with us and we are willing to pack a six to eight pound machine with us most places we go. But this is only in North America. In many other places around the world, people are getting online in whole new ways. Travel to places like Korea, Japan, and China and you wonÕt see many people in public spaces with laptops like you see here. Instead, you see people staring into the little screens of their cell phones. In most Asian countries, cell service blankets the entire nation. Their countries are densely populated and cell phones and service plans are far cheaper than they are in Canada. Most places enjoy 3G cell service, which makes data transfer and Internet service faster and more reliable. While it seems in North America that you need to be under the age of 20 to be truly involved with text messaging, in most Asian nations, every where you go, you find people tapping away on their keypads. In Japan, it is illegal to be talking on your cell phone while riding a train or a public bus, so everyone surfs the Internet on their phones instead. In fact, so many people spend so much time with their phones that five of the current top ten best selling novels in Japan were written on phones and are meant to be read on phones. While many TV advertisements show us that we have the capability to both listen to music on our phones and watch full television shows and movies, the reality is that relatively few people here use them in this way. Other side On the other side of the globe, however, not only do people watch movies on their phones, but several of the most popular shows right now were meant to be watched on the smallest screens. This has posed specific problems for producers and directors as they have had to learn how to best display something on a screen that is only several square inches in size. Overall, it has meant a lot of close up shots, bright colours, and few pans or movements of the camera, as this looks blurry on a phone. While it may be some time until our phones and our phone networks catch up with the speed and size of those in many Asian countries, we are on the way with using different devices to get on to the Internet. The most popular example here is turning out to be the new iPod Touch. While meant to be both an upgrade to the line of iPods, and a device that is cheaper than the still-not-available-in-Canada iPhone, Apple has hit on an interesting trend. An example. Several weeks ago in my classroom, one of my students needed to finish up a bit of research for a project, and the computers in my classroom were busy. She was frustrated and needed to get online. Hearing this, one of the other students asked her, ÒIsnÕt your iPod in your locker?Ó She said yes and asked me if she could go get it and if we could figure out how to hook it up to the wireless Internet service in the school. In about two minutes flat we had it working and ten minutes later she was finished. For $300 you can buy one of these little machines. They will hold your movies, photos and music. They will let you surf the web, play online games, send e-mail, check the weather, use maps, etc. While difficult to type on, they are a great addition or second device if you need something portable to use occasionally. While we still have a long way to go until our phones and iPods take over in popularity from laptops as a way to get online, the move toward smaller, more portable devices is clear. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
