DIIA Blog

photo: www.gizmodo.com

Let’s all hope the rumors of Apple’s tablet computer are true or else there will be a lot of tech writers who will have to eat their lunch. The much rumored and speculated “iTablet” may make a debut sometime early next year, possibly in January. If such a device exists it will be one product launch that may out do all the others in recent memory, including the iPhone. Let’s hope Apple does not disappoint.

Along with the written speculation, there have been a number of artist mockups too about what the device will look like. These are are pretty much the same, a slab of technology with about a 10″ touch screen. What you don’t see in these drawings is the software and interface interaction. Sure, it will be some flavor of OS X obviously, but it will be how we interact and use the thing that will capture the imagination more than just an artists rendition of the physical device.

As the rumors swirl, its easy to try and imagine what the device would be like to use and I believe there are plenty of hints already out there in the form of your iphone and iPod Touch. Some may ask, just what will make the tablet better than an iPhone and even a 13″ MacBook or MacBook Pro? Why would one want one and what is the big deal anyway? Well, ask yourself that question too about the iPhone when it came out. We have had cell phones a long time and the new models rolling out never really got us all excited. I mean it was just another phone. But Apple showed us something quite different. I suspect they may do it again with the tablet. “See, now this is a TABLET!” is what the thing may scream. Its not just another netbook or laptop…its a new way of interacting with not only hardware, but software and all the media of today’s digital diet.

I think the big deal is going to be in the touch screen no doubt. Currently, there are no small form factor devices that have given users an adequate experience. Much as I love the iPhone, the screen does get a little small at times, but it is ALWAYS there. Pull it out of your pocket and bam, there is the web in your hand and 85,000 other things you can do with it too.   No, you are not going to put an Apple tablet in your pocket, but slip it into a small case and it can easily disappear in a backpack or purse without the bulk of even a Netbook. Hopefully Apple will find the sweet spot for screen size. All bets are it will be in the 10″ range. Such a device could give the Microsoft Surface a run for its money in the portable space.   

And while the iPhone is a great media consumption device, it does have its limits. Its not a great tool for editing media unless you like working on very small screens. And its not great a producing media, although its getting better with video in the 3GS and a better still camera. Typing out more than short emails is not a fun experience. Ditto for taking notes or any sort of long form writing. Also, editing video can be done on the 3GS but its not great at all. Same for photos and audio. Watching video is nice, but I don’t want to watch Lawrence of Arabia on it.

What I think will be so great about a tablet will be the opening up of the mobile world to larger touch screen devices and what this will mean for computing in general. In addition, I can see the value of a touch screen computer on your desktop. While Apple’s new Magic Mouse is quite cool and will pave the way for more touch versatile input devices it could be something like a remixed tablet that begins moving us further down this road. Our current input devices still work pretty well, especially the keyboard on desktop systems, but we need to move on to other paradigms in the next few years. However, its when you get a larger touch screen on a mobile device mobile that things get interesting, as the iPhone showed us in small, elegant ways. I personally like how easy it is to flip through home screens, open web pages, and even closing and launching apps is effortless (lets not talk about typing shall we), not to mention all the creative ways people have come up using the screen through the Apps. Unleash a larger screen space on developers and who knows what we will be flicking with our fingers. Its pretty easy to make the leap into what a slightly larger screen with the same touch capabilities as the iPhone will be like…it will be the same, only better.   

I can see an almost full sized virtual keyboard, some interesting touch screen multimedia editing capabilities and hopefully some nice integration with things like HDMI TVs and your desktop computer. Borrowing a page from Wacom’s Cintinq line, it would be cool too see the device as a small secondary screen for your laptop or desktop. An integrated iSight and possibly down the road, a LCD projector would be nice too. Essentially, the tablet would become a sort of sketchpad of the 21st century allowing one to both consume and produce media with ease. One intriguing possibility would be that the device can replace your keyboard on your desktop offering you a completely new way to interact with your desktop system (or home entertainment system) while giving you the freedom of mobility. This thing will change its use simply by what device you are using it with. This may be the device that starts to really pull us away from the mouse and keyboard. Look at the small wireless keyboard Apple sells for its desktops and Mac Mini and imagine that form factor as a touch screen device paired with your desktop. Now that would be interesting (and more comfortable). Imagine having several people with tablets being able to interact with each other’s desktops or a single larger display. It could be a very interesting collaborative device. And while its not doing anything it can be the ultimate portable digital picture frame on your desk, but I digress…

And of course, with all the ebook excitement, such a tablet would take the digital book and magazine experience to a new level making the Kindle and its E-Ink brethren look positively 19th century. One notable area absent from the slew of ereaders hitting the streets is of course color and screen resolution. This leaves glossy coffee table photo books out in the digital cold. A device like what Apple may bring to fruition could fit a niche for this content giving viewers rich color images (and hopefully HD video) paired with a super high resolution touch screen (iPhone screens have twice the resolution dpi of your desktop displays). Low resolution displays (and projectors) have long been the bane of presenters who can fit more on one piece of paper than on one computer screen (thank you Edward Tufte for that insight). Comic books too are perhaps an area that an Apple tablet could breathe new digital life into. And then there would be the gaming and all the cool potential of field based computing that could be done on a device with multiple sensors, and a high res color screen. Mobile mapping may never have looked so good…

So while we wait with baited breath for a new device from Apple that may (or may not) actually exist, ponder the possibilities of what it may offer by looking and thinking closely at its little brother the iPhone. Perhaps Apple has used it as the ultimate test bed for “the next big(ger) thing.” Only time will tell….and that time is coming soon.

Keene Haywood

In the video below, Dr. Natasha Beretvas, Associate Professor & Area Chair (Quantitative Methods) with the Department of Educational Psychology (UT-Austin), explains statistics in a way that makes the (wide-ranging) topic very approachable and less-threatening–at least for stats-aversive folks like me!

Dr. Natasha Beretvas makes stats easy!
As a side-note, when I first saw the video, I was impressed at how she was able to conjure up this eloquent narrative explanation off the top of her head. Since then, I found that this was filmed with a camera that has a tele-prompter mounted just above the lens. (I’m still impressed!)

As the newspaper industry endures the pain of transition to the brave new digital world and the age old tradition of college textbooks is challenged by the Web and a slew of new electronic reading devices, Amazon is answering the call by providing digital outlets for the publishing world. The original Kindle was launched in November, 2007 and then this past February, Kindle 2 was released to great fanfare. Tomorrow, Amazon will unveil a new Kindle that is supposedly bigger and will be more appropriate for reading things like newspapers and textbooks. Should the new device be all it is trumped up to be, it could definitely shake things around further on campuses and newsrooms around the nation. The e-reader revolution is upon us and Amazon is not sitting idly on the sidelines. While there is little information about the new Kindle features other than it will be larger, the device will definitely get lots of press. What remains to be seen is how well the public will take to it. The price point will have to come down, I would imagine, for students to really take notice. At $359 its not exactly pizza change. One report noted that a Kindle is about the same price as some Netbooks but without most of the functionality of a Netbook. Its a good point. Unless you just have lots of digital information for serious reading, e-readers may not be for you, but at some point in the not too distant future I think its a safe bet that some form of e-reader will become commonplace. As the new devices proliferate, they will take some getting used to. I know people who swore they would never read news online and now that is all they do ending their paper subscriptions. With textbooks delivered wirelessly to students’ e-readers, the whole textbook market stands to be shaken as well. Watch the news tomorrow and see what Amazon has in store. It should be quite a read.

On a quieter note, Amazon recently acquired the excellent e-reader software Stanza by buying its parent company Lexcycle. Stanza is probably the best e-reader software out there so it will be interesting to see what Amazon does with its new acquisition and how it will play into the Kindle initiative.

Keene

Each year, the New Media Consortium (headquartered in Austin) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative collaboratively publish a projection of technological trends in education called the Horizon Report. An article in today’s The Wired Campus by Steve Kolowich entitled “Horizon Report” Names Top Technology Trends to Watch for in Education lists a few advances that were reported early on in our DIIA Blog, thanks to Keene Haywood’s excellent technology posts.

Using recent third-party applications, smart phones and other mobile devices have the potential to consolidate numerous teaching, learning, and administrative tools into devices that fit into the palms of students’ hands. (See here and here).

Cloud computing will allow campus users to access more tools and information at a lower cost.

Electronics that have “geo-locators“ could have important applications for field research, specifically with regard to tracking the movement of animal populations or mapping data sets to study weather, migration, or urban development patterns. Similarly, “smart” objects—which are aware not only of their locations but of themselves and their environment—are already used in some libraries for tracking and tagging materials and may have analogous applications across a number of academic disciplines.

To cut through the ocean of information on the internet, the personal Web—i.e., widgets and services that help connect individual users to the Web-based information relevant to them—will allow students, professors, and administrators to use the Web more efficiently.

Semantic-aware (technology designed to analyze the meaning of phrases typed into search boxes, rather than just the keywords) applications will emerge to allow students to use one of the Internet’s more popular features—Web search—more efficiently. These applications may eventually help researchers organize and present their findings in ways that more easily describe conceptual relationships among collected data.

Good things do come in small packages. Its true for certain types of jewelry and also electronics, with the latter getting smaller and better all the time. The long awaited Pico Pocket projector from Optoma is finally making is public debut after months and months of conjecture about it and fears of vaporware. The 11 lumens LED bulb and innards are made by Texas Instruments. This is going to be very cool. I predict it may just do for presentations what PowerPoint has done (and I mean that in a good way)…or perhaps I should say Keynote instead of PowerPoint. This small bombshell of technology uses a powerful LED lamp to project a DVD quality image onto just about any surface up to 8.5 feet away and 60 inches across. It will run about $500. The lamp is rated at 20,000 hrs and is not replacable which is a minor downer. It runs on its own battery (2 hr. life) so power bricks can stay home. It has a speaker too, but apparently this is its weakest feature. Read on from Gizmodo and NYTimes’ David Pogue who are singing its praises. I would say its the perfect size for stocking stuffing this holiday season. Seriously, this has the potential to have lots of interesting uses, the first and foremost being able to show a small group a presentation, video, etc. on the fly. More gadgets like this are sure to turn up as computers get more and more uhh…mobilized. So people will ask if you have finally made it to the little screen yet. I want one!

Keene

PC Magazine posted a helpful article on how to choose a DTV converter box, plus information about associated remote controls, and the need for an indoor/outdoor antenna.

Included are links to the official DTV transition site, where you can find more tips plus coupons to offset the cost of your converter box, the DTV Transition Coalition site, and the AntennaWeb, which rounds out the equipment and information you need to update your television.

Remember–you have until February 17th, 2009 to get set up before your TV turns into a pumpkin!

Much has been made of Pure Digital’s Flipline of pocket video cameras. Inexpensive, convenient, easy to use and decent audio and video quality (for the price). Its made video as easy as point and shoot. Well the ante has been upped some from the vernable imaging gurus at Kodak. They have introduced the Vi6 pocket video camera that shoots in 720p, 60fps, 16:9 aspect ratio using H.264 encoding. This is compressed HD in a form factor about the size of a Flip Mino. Also, the Vi6 can take memory cards (SD/SDHC formats) up to 32 GB giving one lots of room to shoot all those lectures one is attending this semester. The Flip cameras only have built in 2 GB memory that is not expandable. Kodak’s video quality is considerably better than the Flip provides at the moment, but I bet Pure Digital won’t be standing still long, even if they just came out with the Mino. The camera will run about $180.00 plus a memory card.

note: Sanyo’s Xacti line is also a great option for run and gun HD shooting, but alas, these cams are quite a bit more expensive and a little bigger (not as pocket friendly)

No, its not a newly discovered dinosaur, but it is a newly developed hardware/software package that takes digital photographs from point and shoot cameras to a new level. The Gigapan is not revolutionary in what it does, but it is revolutionary in its price and ability to take your digital images off to new horizons that will more than make your Aunt Gertrude smile. She might just drop her dentures. What does it do? It is a robotic device that can enable your still camera to take dozens of images of a scene and then stitch them together into one image that you can then zoom into seeing a high level of detail. Gigapan is still in beta but will soon be unleashed on the world… The education world should take note that this tool may very well be something to add to your arsenal if you use still images in your teaching or research. Gigapan is the brain child of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and NASA Ames, along with support from Google and a little place called CharmedLabs here in Austin. CharmedLabs has been making the hardware and CMU and Nasa have been working out the circuitry and software. Once an image is created, it can be uploaded to the Gigapan.org web site where people can explore the images, annotate them with “snapshots” and even add additional links to things they discover in the images. This is not QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR), but a close cousin. Once the system is calibrated for your camera’s field of view (a number of the point and shoot models have been tested in beta), the system rests on a tripod and the user directs the camera to the upper left and lower right corners of the images. Hit the OK button and Gigapan then fills in the gaps creating the panorama. There is a 360 degree option as well that will let you create a seamless image that you can navigate. Other devices out there can capture equally if not more jaw dropping images, but not at the price point of the Gigapan which should be in the $250-$300 range (including software) when it comes to market. The purpose of the Gigapan is to allow this type of photography to be within reach of people who have point and shoot digital cameras, limited budgets and possibly skipped geometry class in High School. The Gigapan was also developed in conjunction with the web site which serves as the public front for the images created with the Gigapan. Some of the best images are also found in a default Gigapan layer in Google Earth. I can keep babbling about this technology, but to really appreciate it, you need to see the results. Go to Gigapan.org and be prepared to say Wow! The device should be out for sale to the public sometime later this fall. I will post a note at this blog when they are available. And, btw, the software is very easy to use. It makes stitching and publishing literally a minimal button affair.

Keene