Assignment 9: Past and Future

One of the two products that I have found played a signifcant role in the year 2008 was the blackberry Storm. The Blackberry storm is a smartphonedeveloped by Research in Motion (RIM). It is part of the 9500 series of phones. It is RIM’s first touchscreen device and first device without a physical keyboard and will feature a touchscreen which reacts physically like a button via SurePress, a Research in Motion patented technology of providing haptic feedback. It will be available through Vodafone in the UK, Ireland and Australia, Verizon Wireless in the United States, Telus and Bell in Canada. The Blackberry storm was the first touchscreen Blackberry to be released. Now with the introduction of the storm, Blackberry is capable of competing in the ongoing phone market. Touchscreen phones are the newest phones to come out and is known to youth as the “in” thing. The BlackBerry Storm is a world-phone, and one to be seriously considered in the new year of 2009.

The secong product to be released in 2008 that I found played a significant role and made a large impact on the market is the HP Touchsmart commputer. In case you haven’t noticed, « Touch » is all the rage these days. It was only a matter of time before a PC maker was to build a touch-PC, it just happened to be HP. The idea behind the HP Touchsmart is to engage consumers by having them interact with their digital media in a whole new way. It will take some work to convince me to get one of these, but I suppose that in places where a keyboard has no reason to be (living room, kitchen) one might be tempted to use a touch-computer like this one. (Of course, it does come with a wireless mouse and keyboard) Come back to this site to get our first impressions as we play with it today. The Hp touchsmart computer allows one to have physical contact with the comuter while controlling it as if a mouse, all at the same time. However, the HP Touchsmart cannot yet compete with the Mac brought to us proudly by Apple. The HP Touchsmart is not as fast as the Apple iMac.

One significant product that I presume will have a large impact on the tech world would have to be the Google phone. The T-Mobile G1 (known as the HTC Dream during development) is an Internet-enabled smartphone with software designed by Google and hardware designed by High Tech Computer Coorperation of Taiwan. The G1 is the first phone to the market that uses the Android mobile device platform.The phone is part of an open standards effort of the Open Handset Alliance.It was released in the US on October 22, 2008, in the UK on October 30, 2008,and will be available in other European countries including Germany, Netherlands and the Czech Republic in early 2009. In the US, it is priced starting at $179 for new and existing T-Mobile customers if purchased with a two-year T-Mobile voice and data plan, and $399 without a contract. The G1 comes in black, bronze, or white.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackberry_storm

http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/touchsmart/

http://nytimes.com.com/desktops/hp-touchsmart-iq770/4505-3118_9-32305738.html