Handheld Devices Essay

Handheld Devices

In this day and age, handheld devices have become a craze and it is getting to the point where it is very hard to find anyone without some kind of handheld device in his/her hand.

• What exactly is a Handheld Device?

To put it simply, a handheld device is a pocket-size computing device with a display screen and input/output like an external or touch screen keyboard. Going by this definition of handheld devices and gadgets many appliances can qualify to be called handheld, like a mobile phone, PDA, mobile PC, handheld game consoles and so on.

Some examples of popular handheld devices include:

• Notebook PC

• Handheld game consoles

• Nintendo DS

• Game Boy

• Game Boy Advance

• Pokémon Mini

• PlayStation Portable

• Ultra-Mobile

Even a roadside tea vendor can be seen merrily chatting away on his/her mobile phone or the busy executive jotting down notes on his/her PDA. Handheld gadgets like the mobile are slowly replacing the fixed-line telephone and this amazing transition from the wired to the wireless world couldn't have been possible without the numerous benefits provided by handheld devices.

• An office-on-the-go

In this day and age handheld devices like Smartphone’s and PDA’s allow the user to literally take your office with you. You can send and receive e-mails, browse the internet wirelessly at 3G speeds, access secure office files through VPN’s, edit files and much more on your handheld devices. Therefore, you are no longer limited by either size or mobility to increase your productivity.

• High Convenience

It is far easier to store a quick note on your PDA instead of rushing home and accessing your computer. The handheld devices of this day and age can do all the functions that your traditional computer provided you with and

In early childhood education, the term ICT could include computer hardware and software, digital cameras and video cameras, the internet, telecommunication tools and many other devices.

There are many reasons why ICT is particularly important during early years education, some of these include: It is not uncommon to walk into a nursery and see children independently taking photographs of each other using a digital camera. Today’s young children are growing up in a world in which technology is so pervasive that to them it is the norm. Because of this it is all too easy to deny that we have a responsibility to teach ICT to children because ‘they know more than we do’ or because ‘they will learn how to use it anyway’. Angela McFarlane, in a presentation at the Naace 2009 Conference, challenged this myth of the ‘digital native’. She reported that although a third of the children in her study were really engaging with technology, a significant proportion were not engaging with it at all and that the remainder of the children really didn’t know how to use technology, even if it looked like they did! We need to be clear, therefore, that we do need to teach our young children about technology so that they can all engage with