Information appliance Totally Explained

Everything about Information Appliance totally explained

An information appliance (IA) is an appliance specializing in information, a personal device designed to perform a specific activity, such as playing music, photography, or editing text, in a simple and user-friendly way. Typical examples are smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Information appliances partially overlap in definition with, or are sometimes referred to as, smart devices, embedded systems, mobile devices, wireless devices, or handheld devices.

Appliance vs computer

The term information appliance was coined by Jef Raskin around 1979. As later explained by a influential Donald Norman's The Invisible Computer, the main characteristics of IA, as opposed to any normal computer, were:

designed and pre-configured for a single application (like a toaster appliance, which is designed only to make toasts),
so easy to use for untrained people, that it effectively becomes unnoticeable, "invisible" to them,
able to automatically share information with any other IAs.

This definition of IA was different from today's. Jef Raskin initially tried to include such features in the Apple Macintosh, which he designed, but eventually the project went quite different way. For a short while during the mid- and late 1980s, there were a few models of simple electronic typewriters with screens and some form of memory storage. These dedicated word processor machines had some of the attributes of an information appliance, and Raskin designed one of them, the Canon Cat. He described some properties of his definition of information appliance in his book The Humane Interface. Larry Ellison, Oracle Corporation CEO, incorrectly predicted that information appliances and network computers would supersede personal computers (PCs).

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.

Further Information

Get more info on 'Information Appliance'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://information_appliance.totallyexplained.com">Information appliance Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.