Eric Baber's blog

Yesterday I received a Dell Streak and already like it a lot. I thought I'd put down a number of impressions in writing.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, the Streak is a bigger-than-a-phone-smaller-than-the-iPad device that calls itself a "tablet". It's got a 5"/12.7cm screen, which makes the whole thing just barely fit into a shirt pocket. It'll very comfortably fit into a jacket pocket though, and it somehow feels like it's aimed at the type of person who would be wearing a (suit) jacket.

One of the first thing that strikes about it is the fact that it's designed to be used in landscape mode, unlike most phones, which are designed to be used in portrait mode. The physical home, menu and back buttons are down the right-hand side, and the home screen is always displayed in landscape mode and doesn't rotate unlike any of the other screens, so it immediately tells you what the whole machine is about - consuming content, basically, rather than making phone calls. Yes it's also a phone but my guess is that you'd look pretty silly with it stuck to your ear; used as a phone it would definitely look like a throwback to the first carphones of the 80s.

I say "you'd look pretty silly" because I haven't actually used it as a phone yet, and my guess is that I'm not alone in that. It's clearly designed for people who read and input text a lot - to that effect it's got a full (virtual) QWERTY keyboard whenever text entry is required, unlike the phone-style keyboard input of most mobiles. The expanded screen size makes inputing text much easier than on, say, the Nexus One given the increased likelihood of actually hitting the right keys; having said that, the iPhone is pretty much the same size as the Nexus One and text-entry on that is good, so maybe it's as much a software issue as a hardware one.

On that note - software - the thing that irks me most is that the Streak (in the UK at least) is still on Android 1.6 rather than 2.1 or even 2.2 like you can get on the Nexus One. Attempts to update it have so far eluded me; chances are it would take a manual update of a type "not supported by Dell", which is annoying given that it's a brand-new device.

What else. Reception is excellent - usually at work I get one or at most two bars on most of my phones. On the Streak I'm getting four and even occasionally five. Whether it's actually lying to me a la iOS who knows, but download speeds are better than on other phones I've used at my desk, so it seems to be accurate.

I've also installed Kindle and have downloaded a couple of books I'd already started reading on it. Reading on the Streak screen so far is good - I've always struggled with reading any decent amounts of text on the Nexus One or the iPhone, but this screen is big enough to display a decent amount of text in a reasonable font size which is nice. And a praise for the Kindle architecture - it's great being able to read a book on another device, close it down, fire up Kindle on another one and immediately carry on reading where you left off without having to remember where you'd got to. Very nice indeed.

As to apps, the Android Market now has everything I want, and a whole lot more. One curious thing that struck me is that when logging into the Market via the Streak it serves me up predominantly paid-for apps; when logging in from the Nexus One it serves me up predominantly free ones. Fluke? The fact that the Streak is running 1.6 and therefore perhaps supports fewer apps, and those happen to be fee-charging? I have no idea, but it's definitely a marked difference. I doubt it's as a result of the OS version - I've been able to find and install every app on the Streak I'd already had on the Nexus One, so it doesn't seem to be a matter of fewer apps being supported on 1.6. I wonder if anyone else has noticed this difference?

A minor thing - having a larger screen-size also makes it easier to keep the home and adjacent screens tidier. It's nice being able to put more of your commonly-used apps on the home screen. As I say a minor thing, but nice nonetheless.

Another not-quite-so-minor thing - I do miss the trackball that the Nexus One has. Occasionally, e.g. when scrolling through tweets on Twidroid, it's far easier to accurately scroll through and highlight content via the trackball than it is with your finger. I'm sure I'll get used to not having one, but initially I do miss it.

And finally one huge irritation - the charger is a non-standard, i.e. non-(micro) USB one. Yet another charger needed!!! How very annoying. What's wrong with micro USB, Dell??

However, on the whole, I like it. I'm still trying to decide who this machine is aimed at: it tries to - and succeeds at - integrate social networking (it has a built-in Facebook app which works better than any other one I've previously used). However, the price (£500) and size (brick) means it's unlikely to be attractive to kidz. Instead, it's likely to appeal to thirties-somethings - people who do do the social networking thing but also want something a bit heavier-weight on which to do proper e-mails and view work-related documents (it comes pre-installed with Quickoffice). A substantial market-size I'm sure, so this may well be the first of a tranche of similar devices.

If anyone else out there has used one feel free to add your own comments. And if anyone has managed to update their OS to 2.1 or 2.2 I'd love to hear how!

Earlier this week I gave a talk at a UK university. The audience was made up of lecturers from a variety of disciplines, and the theme was "Learners in the 21st century". My opening gambit was to poll the audience on a number of issues - "How many social networking channels do you use", "How much of the assigned reading do you think your students do", things like that. The polling itself I did via polls set up at http://www.smspoll.net, a neat website that lets you set up polls that allow people to vote via SMS from their mobile phones. So, the first thing I did was pull up the first poll, ask the audience to get their mobile phones out, and to vote via SMS. The purpose of the whole exercise was 3-fold - 1) so I could get a feel for the audience, 2), to prime them on a number of issues I'd be discussing, and 3) to show them that mobiles can be used meaningfully for teaching and learning.

After the session, one of the delegates came up to me and said that she and a number of her colleagues had felt excluded (her word) because they didn't have mobiles, or that their mobiles didn't have the necessary functionality. I accepted her feedback, but also pointed out that it was almost certainly the case that any mobile would be able to send SMS messages, and that maybe they just weren't familiar with doing so. She was, however, clearly still somewhat upset at having been excluded. (Turns out that the polls received 24 votes out of about 80 people in the audience).

I must say I was taken aback. I hadn't anticipated that there would be anyone in the room who didn't own a mobile (though I anticipated that some of them may have left theirs in the staff room or whatever), but this is clearly the case. I've been pondering ever since whether I was unreasonable to expect all members of my audience - university lecturers - to have a mobile. So there's a question for you - was I being unreasonable?

In terms of a bigger picture, even if I personally was unreasonable to have that expectation, what should we (society as a whole) expect from our educators? The theme of the conference overall was "Designing Learning in the twenty-first century". So there's clearly a theme here: we know that our learners learn/live their lives differently from those in the 20th century, and we need to keep up with developments. So there seems to be an acknowledgement here that we need to understand our learners better in order to serve them better. If this is the case, then isn't it our duty as educators to farmiliarise ourselves with our learners' lifestyles? I'm not saying that all teachers should go out and buy themselves every games console under the sun along with all of the most popular games, but isn't mobile-phone literacy nowadays as much of a 21st-century skill as computer literacy? And how can we as educators prepare the next generation of the workforce if we're not comfortable with the major trends of today ourselves?

So, over to you - was I unreasonable in my first expectation (that all lecturers would have mobile phones), and do you think it's fair to expect educators to be familiar with current "currency" if they're the ones educating the next generation?

Over the past few months rumours about a new Apple device – variously dubbed the iSlate, the iTablet, and the iPad – have abounded. The wait is finally over; on 27 January Apple announced its new device, the iPad. Here are some thoughts of mine about the iPad, in particular from the point of view of publishing.

If I had to summarise the iPad in one word, it would be this: convergence. It brings together a multitude of features and functionalities that are already available on the market: a screen not too big and not too small (9.7 inches – nearly the same as most netbooks); wireless access and, in some versions, 3G access; a touch-screen (“virtual”) keyboard roughly the same size as that on a netbook; and multimedia, web-browsing, e-mail and general computing capabilities. So what’s new?

Well, not much really – at least not in terms of general functionality. But then the same could be said about the iPhone when that came out (all it really did was converge disparate functions which were already available in different devices), and that proved a groundbreaking formula which other mobile phone manufacturers have yet to rival. Is the iPad therefore likely to revolutionise the consumer market yet again? Let’s see.

First, some facts. The iPad has a 9.7 inch screen (nearly the same size as the Kindle DX – that’s the large one). It’s 0.5 inches thin and weighs 1.5lb, which is very thin and fairly light. It doesn’t have a physical keyboard; instead the screen can be used as a keyboard for inputting text. A final figure is the price: starting at $499 that’s half the price of what many people were predicting. If you want 3G in addition to wireless connectivity the price goes up, as it does as well for more memory.

Steve Jobs in his launch presentation went to great lengths to outline that what they were trying to build was a third type of device, between the mobile phone and the laptop. He more or less acknowledged that that space is currently being filled by netbooks, but stated that they were just “small, cheap laptops”. The iPad, meanwhile, is “the best”: “the best way to experience the web, email, photos and videos”. A tall order. So will it garner some market-share from the netbook market? Almost certainly, since it is lighter and even more compact since the keyboard is effectively integrated into the screen, and because the screen quality may well be better than that of most netbooks. For some, though, the absence of a physical keyboard will prove uncomfortable, so this feature is unlikely to allow Apple to entirely corner this market.

Another of the main device-genres it is going head-to-head with is the dedicated ebook reader such as the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader. And it will almost certainly steal some of its market share since those two devices are fairly limited in what they can do (allow you to read books, and, in the case of the Kindle, also do some limited websurfing and emailing), and are black-and-white only. The iPad offers significantly more at an only slightly higher price. However, dedicated ebook readers will still have one over the iPad in terms of ease of reading. Ebook readers typically deploy a technology called e-ink; this makes reading off their screens nearly as comfortable on the eyes as reading off paper. The screen on the iPad meanwhile, like those on computer monitors and mobile phones, is backlit, making it tougher on the eyes to do extensive reading (and, incidentally, draining the battery much more quickly). So for some consumers the added functionalities of the iPad will be attractive, while others will prefer a device which does less, but does that better.

Apart from the hardware, though, the other big selling point for the iPad is the expansion of its iTunes store to not only offer music and apps (which, incidentally, also work on the iPad – a huge bonus), but also “ebooks” in epub format. I put “ebooks” into quotation marks because the epub format does not just support text, but also embedded audio and video, animations and more. This will allow publishers to create much richer content, and distribute it easily and directly to the consumer. Whether this will constitute a complete revolution is questionable though. iTunes really was the first of its kind when it first came out – the first mechanism for buying music in pretty much any way a customer might want to buy it – on a song-by-song basis, the entire album, the entire album plus a video, etc. In the case of educational content, though, this isn’t the case: there are already a multitude of channels available through which customers can buy digital content: http://www.ebooks.com , http://shop.ebrary.com , http://waterstones.com/ebooks , publishers’ own websites and so on. Apple will no doubt point towards its new media-rich format, but again that’s not new; companies such as http://www.blankpage.ch already provide this on a range of platforms, meaning consumers don’t have to buy yet another piece of hardware. So this will make it a bit more of a challenge to Apple to convince customers that their offering is unique.

What it almost certainly will do, though, is drive the market towards devices of a similar size with colour, multimedia capabilities, ultimately on a screen which will become better and easier on the eyes than the current one. This in turn will push the market towards content that is multi-media rich: instead of just plain text, consumers (I hesitate to call them “readers”) will be more interested in content that mixes the written word, audio, video and more – much like CD-ROMs have been affording us for nearly two decades now.

So what does all of this mean for publishers?

• For some publishing areas such as the school- and textbook markets, publishers need to expand the type of products they offer. Many already offer multimedia-rich content; at the moment this is distributed on CD-ROMs and online. They will almost certainly need to repackage these types of product in the form of self-contained ebooks in iBook or other formats as users expect to be able to download one chunk of content which contains all the relevant multimedia elements. Also, much of the current content is aimed at the teachers, for use in the classroom; new content aimed specifically at learners will need to be developed as entire classes of students kit themselves out with iPad- or netbook-like devices
• Publishers need to keep a close eye on both entrants to the market and ones coming into the educational market from other angles. Companies specialising in producing educational films, for example, have a skillset and experience vital for this new type of product. In the same way that traditional paper-based publishers will need to branch into these areas new to them, some of those film companies will expand their skillset to embrace text and other multimedia. The smart money is likely to be on collaborations, partnerships, mergers and the like – constellations of entities that complement each other and are able to bring new products to market quickly.
• Another group of entrants will be users themselves as it is likely that making content for sale through the iBook Store will be similar to selling content through the app store, i.e. open to virtually anyone (upon approval from Apple), not just large publishing houses. This can be seen either as a challenge or an opportunity: publishers can either look purely at the content model and see user-generated content as competition, or else take a wider view, and think about what services they might be able to offer content-generating users.
• Probably the most complex piece will prove to be the sales and distribution model. Publishers utilise different distribution channels - local retailers, direct-to-institution sales, direct-to-consumer via their own websites etc. Apple’s new infrastructure will make the relationship of publishers with their distributors potentially more complex than in the past as geography becomes less of an issue and tracking of sales and marketing activities will become more complicated.

All in all therefore a mixed bag with regards to whether the iPad will herald a revolution or merely an evolution. Of course, what may just make the day for Apple is the iPad’s form factor – the look and feel which Apple is so good at, and which has made millions of people hold the iPhone in their hands and say “wow”. As they say, watch this space.