Information appliance

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Not to be confused with Computer appliance or Internet appliance.
Newton PDA
Android smartphones

An information appliance (IA) is an appliance that is designed to easily perform a specific electronic function such as

playing music, photography, or editing text.[1][2]

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 or wireless devices.

Appliance vs computer

The term information appliance was coined by

Donald Norman in his influential The Invisible Computer,[5] 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 toast),
  • 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 a 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
.

network computers would supersede personal computers (PCs).[6]

See also

References

  1. ISBN 1-85233-791-5
    . Retrieved 2008-05-06.
  2. ISBN 0-321-11629-1
    . Retrieved 2008-05-06.
  3. ISBN 1-55860-600-9
    . Retrieved 2008-05-06.
  4. ISBN 0-9689108-0-7
    . Retrieved 2008-05-06.
  5. ISBN 0-262-64041-4
    .
  6. ISBN 0-13-019469-7
    . Retrieved 2008-05-06. information network desktop computer IT appliance 1970-2005.

External links

Look up Appliance in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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