We rely on many different mobile devices for home, work, and play. In this video, you’ll learn about tablets, wearable technology, virtual reality, and more.
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Tablets are one of the most popular categories of mobile devices today. And they’re usually running an operating system such as iOS or Android. They’re usually about seven inches diagonal or larger.
And we’re using touchscreen access on these devices. You can see they don’t have a keyboard. There’s no mouse associated with this. We might also have stylus or other types of input as well, depending on the device itself.
These tablets can support a wide range of different applications, everything from productivity to games or utilities. And they’re very good at taking pictures or watching movies or other types of media that you might want to use on this tablet device.
Perhaps the most popular mobile device today is the smartphone. This is our mobile communication hub. We can make phone calls. We can text. We can send emails, all from this very small three and 1/2 inch to about six inch diagonal device.
This makes a very good media viewer as well. We can watch movies and watch videos on these devices. And of course if we’re traveling, this is great for getting maps and travel information. And you can run many different kinds of applications on these as well, everything from specialized apps to games and so much more.
Wearable technology would be a mobile device that you could wear somewhere on a person. So it might be a smartwatch, for example, which takes the place of the traditional mechanical watches. And usually it integrates with our mobile devices, such as our mobile phones and our tablets.
Another popular wearable device is the fitness monitor, so we’re able to track our heart rate. We can see how much we’ve walked or run today. It’s even able to see how our sleep patterns are working, because it knows when we’re moving and when we’re not moving.
With virtual reality devices, we’re completely removing the real world and entering a virtual world. You can see this display that you’d put on doesn’t allow you to see anything that’s outside of that particular screen. With virtual reality, it’s common to use input devices that you would use outside of that display. But all of this input is occurring inside of the virtual world.
This is useful if you’d like to play games. There’s industrial design applications, some applications where you can create art in this virtual world. And because you’re able to move around and look in different places, it enhances the ability to watch videos and to view images, all in this virtual environment.
If you wanted to combine the virtual world and the real world, you would have augmented reality. This is usually accomplished by wearing a special kind of eyeglass. Or perhaps you’re looking through a screen of a tablet or a mobile phone. This would allow you to see things that are in the real world. But the computer would augment or add additional information to the things that you’re seeing through that device.
An example of augmented reality in medicine might be where you’re putting on special glasses and able to see an X-ray that’s superimposed on the patient itself. Or maybe you’re traveling. And as you’re going from place to place, you can see messages pop up on buildings or on roads to tell you where you happen to be. And you might be able to use this in gaming, where part of the real world suddenly becomes part of your game.
An e-reader is a mobile device that is specifically created to read books. It might have some capabilities to play music or perform some application use. But most of what you’re doing with an e-reader all revolves around book reading.
Instead of using a color LCD screen, e-readers use a technology called electronic paper. This is a black and white screen that is designed to perform extremely well in direct light. One interesting characteristic of these e-readers is that they have an exceptionally long battery life. When you’re reading information on the screen, you’re not using any of the battery. The only time the battery is used is when you change pages and that information updates on the screen. These e-readers almost exclusively use wireless connectivity. So they may be downloading and updating book information from a Wi-Fi network or a cellular network.
And another category of mobile device is a global positioning system device, a GPS. This is an in-car navigation that gives you turn-by-turn directions on where you need to go. It does require that you have a view of the sky so that it’s able to receive signals from the multiple GPS satellites.
This also requires that you update this information, because our streets and our roads are constantly updated. So usually we’ll have an over the air update that would occur through a wireless network. Or perhaps there’s a memory card that we would install in the GPS to be able to perform this update.