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21 Dec 09

The Unofficial Apple Weblog

"Hitting the road with iPhone GPS apps: A holiday buyers guide"

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How the iPhone Could Reboot Education | Gadget Lab | Wired.com

"You enable them by handing out free iPhones — and then integrating the gadget into your curriculum.

That’s the idea Abilene Christian University has to refresh classroom learning. Located in Texas, the private university just finished its first year of a pilot program, in which 1,000 freshman students had the choice between a free iPhone or an iPod Touch.

The initiative’s goal was to explore how the always-connected iPhone might revolutionize the classroom experience with a dash of digital interactivity. Think web apps to turn in homework, look up campus maps, watch lecture podcasts and check class schedules and grades. For classroom participation, there’s even polling software for Abilene students to digitally raise their hand.

The verdict? It’s working quite well. 2,100 Abilene students, or 48 percent of the population, are now equipped with a free iPhone. Fully 97 percent of the faculty population has iPhones, too. The iPhone is aiding Abilene in giving students the information they need — when they want it, wherever they want it, said Bill Rankin, a professor of medieval studies who helped plan the initiative.

“It’s kind of the TiVoing of education,” Rankin said in a phone interview. “I watch it when I need it and in ways that I need it. And that makes a huge difference.”

The traditional classroom, where an instructor assigns a textbook, is heading toward obsolescence. Why listen to a single source talk about a printed textbook that will imminently be outdated in a few years? That setting seems stale and hopelessly limited when pitted against the internet, which opens a portal to a live stream of information provided by billions of minds.

“About five years ago my students stopped taking notes,” Rankin said. “I asked, ‘Why are you not taking notes?’ And they said, ‘Why would we take notes on that?…. I can go to Wikipedia or go to Google, and I can get all the information I need.”"

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Google's Android may be about to overturn Apple's cart | Technology | The Observer

"The extent of the disruption caused by the iPhone was vividly conveyed in a presentation to the Web 2.0 Summit by Mary Meeker, the celebrated Morgan Stanley analyst. She thinks the iPhone/iPod Touch is the fastest-growing consumer electronics product of all time – with an adoption ramp steeper than those for the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS or Sony PSP. Meeker also says that the mobile internet market is growing much faster even than the web-driven "desktop" internet market of the 1990s. All of which neatly explains why the iPhone has become so dominant so quickly: it was the first mobile device explicitly designed to ride this tiger.

The other company that understood the significance of the mobile internet was Google. Unlike Apple, Google decided not to get into the handset business and instead focused on developing a Linux-based operating system for phones that would then be offered to any manufacturer who wanted in on the act. Thus were born the Android operating system and the Open Handset Alliance – the manufacturers to make the phones.

The first Android phones – launched about a year ago – were disappointing compared with the iPhone. But it was clear that they had got the key factor right – the centrality of permanent access to the internet – and so it was only a matter of waiting for the next generation of handsets to arrive. Last week they began to appear, led by a striking phone (the Droid) from Motorola. Initial reactions from the technology community are pretty positive, so Apple might be about to acquire some real competition.

And not just Apple. The sting in the Android tail was also unveiled this week: Google has launched GPS navigation for the new handsets. It does everything that TomTom, Garmin et al do, and a lot more besides. For example, you can talk to it: tell it to "navigate to the museum with the King Tut exhibition" and it will do an instant Google search and present you with a list of options. Its maps are continually updated because they're not held on the phone. It'll give you live tra

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