In David Pogue’s New York Times (enthusiastic!) review here of Apple’s new iPhone, two powers of the phone are present and functional that come together to truly make 20th century content delivery obsolete. 1) The phone is robustly wireless. 2) The full Internet can be browsed both on the (too slow AT&T network) to which the iPhone is now limited and wirelessly (very fast) in hot spots. The full Internet aspect has a magnification feature: your screen displays the entire width of webpages, and when you want to look more closely at a portion of the page you magnify it by touching the screen with two fingers, spreading the portion you choose to make it bigger.
There are several other features that will help kids learn if they are lucky enough to own one of these machines that will define education in the future. Of course iPhones cost more than $500 now and schools have not figured out how to use mobile phones in classrooms. Neither of those situations is unsolvable. The tough problems have been whipped in creating the technology that can now elegantly deliver what is known by humankind into the hands of youngsters.
June 28th, 2007 at 10:22 am
Other potential hurdles:
* You must be an AT&T customer to use the iPhone. With a market share of 20%, that means 80% of wireless customers must cancel their current contracts to sign with AT&T. Being a Sprint customer, I would have to pay a $175 cancellation on top of the $3000 price tag for the iPhone. AT&T’s exclusive contract runs through 2009.
* Only 4 & 8GB of hard drive space? My tiny video iPod holds 30 GB for less than $200.
* Recent surveys have shown that the majority of IT departments will not even consider the iPhone due to its PC incompatibilities & exclusive AT&T contract. That will dampen business spending & all but eliminate demand for the higher-tier contracts.
This is the ultimate “sell the news” scenario. On Jan 9th 2007, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at the Macworld Conference & Expo. The stock has since been on fire rising 50% to $125, adding $30 billion to the company’s market capitalization. Will the iPhone really hold that much value for Apple? This huge runup comes after a fantastic finish to 2006 after Apple’s stock bottomed out at $50 in October. Thus, nearly everyone holding Apple is sitting on huge gains.
June 28th, 2007 at 11:38 am
Bottom line: we could buy a lot of iPhones – even at the present extravagant rates – for students with the billions we spend on outdated textbooks.
July 2nd, 2007 at 3:45 pm
I do think cost is an issue but that it can be overcome by careful planning, training and lower device and development buy-in costs.s.s.
July 5th, 2007 at 8:04 pm