Friday, February 11, 2011

more tablets launched

Clearing my google reader this morning and notice the launch or eminent launch of a few new tablets being reported via endgadget.



First up, HP has launched their touchpad, with an OS based on the Palm OS, although there is no mention whatsoever of the Palm brand. It will be interesting to assess this tablet as I have always been a bit of a fan of the palm user interface and quite miss my old Treo at times.


Second one, is the possible price in the US of A of the blackberry playbook. Again will be keen to try this one out as CPIT is currently using blackberrys as their corporate phone. 
Comparisons of the various tablets also provides interesting reading. Looking forward now to the coming of the new ipad.
The perenial difficulty we face, as educational users, is the various operating systems running on different hardware platforms. So far, I have tried to work on projects that are not dependent on hardware OS. In our mobile portfolio projects, we relied solely on the phones apprentices owned. At the moment, tablets are still seen to be 'new' and most students do not own one. Instead they own mobile phones, although by observing students in the library, the number of iphones seen in students' hands seems to have increased in the last 6 months or so.
For the 'interactive textbook' project, we have committed to developing a 'front end' template for the Android OS and have purchased an Archos 7 to test drive things. So, for the first time, we will need to explore possibilites for acquiring a class set of tablets to evaluate students' experiences with using the tablet based 'textbook'. I might now also think through the advantages of running a similar 'textbook' layout via Moodle. We can then compare the two and see if reliance on hardware is really required or whether we just ram up the LMS to be accessible across all devices.

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