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.
