My daughter decided to join a beginning computer class I taught one summer, but didn’t really have the motivation to get into it. But, shortly afterwards, she joined a group in her high school that programmed Lego robots for competitions, and had a wonderful time.
When she graduated from college, she had considerable computer knowledge, but decided on an Apple Mac for her personal computer, which was a surprise. But it was even more a surprise when she decided on a Droid smart phone.
All the technology that’s around us is unavoidable for adults who need to use it professionally, but a lot more of it is just for fun. Most households have someone who is hooked in, as they say, but sometimes a kid can be strictly interested in stuff the adults in his family aren’t inspired by, such as video-games, and so on. Our family is fortunate to have Junior feed us information about technology that is both useful and interesting, possibly to a wider audience. I’ll first describe the hardware, and then go over the software, though in principle it is really hard to divide them completely.
Phones
Gradually, people are getting themselves smart phones. The two most popular types are Iphones, from Apple, and Droids, essentially from Google.The Iphones are fully functional phones that can take calls as usual, but they can also connect up to the Internet. Droid phones are essentially similar, using an interface developed by Google, called Android. The Ios interface for Iphones and the Android interface of Droids are really operating systems, which are programs that run constantly, managing the services of the piece of hardware.
Older phones had a display screen, and a keypad. Increasingly, phones have a touch-sensitive screen that throws up a keyboard when needed, so that a separate keyboard is not required. Some people like a keyboard, even a tiny one, and a few phones have a sliding keyboard that is recessed when not being used. But the keyboard is a point of structural vulnerability; a solid phone without moving parts is less fragile, in principle. (The touch-sensitive screens are made of a very sturdy, thin glass-like material developed by Corning Glass, called Gorilla Glass. But my students have managed to crack even that material, but the phone still somehow continues to function. Note: if you crack the glass, replacements are available. It is possible to replace it yourself, I'm told.)
Depending on your Plan, your phone calls, both incoming and outgoing, are metered, and you get billed. In addition, when you use the Internet, you get billed for the time you’re connected to the Internet, as well as the volume of data that goes out to and comes in from the Internet. Every time you connect up, there’s some data going out, and some data coming in, every request is a little data, and then there’s everything that comes in: websites, pictures, text, information, music, etc.
Cellphones function by connecting the phone to Cell Towers that are located everywhere, on actual towers in the country, and on top of tall buildings, in the cities, and the calls are relayed from tower to tower. In places where there are no towers of your phone provider, they may have a reciprocal agreement with another provider (called Roaming), or you may not be able to make or receive the call (a “dead spot”).
Most services allow your phone to use a Wireless Internet connection, in your home, for instance, in which case they won’t count any Internet use while you’re on the home network. You have to provide the password for your home wireless network one time, usually, and the phone remembers it for future connection whenever you’re at home. Similarly at work, you need to provide a password one time. At bookstores and Starbucks restaurants and airports, etc, there are wireless hot spots (provided for laptop computers that passengers might have with them), which the phone can use for data access.
Voice and Text
In addition to phone calls, most phones today which have text capability (a keyboard, or even just the usual keypad), with which they can send text messages. (This uses a channel that was intended to send information about phone calls, but which was under-used, and which the phone companies decided to use to send something that was essentially like e-mail.) The text message arrives at its destination and makes a small alert sound, and then waits. The message can be picked up whenever the recipient desires. It can then be deleted, or kept forever, depending on how much space your phone has. Not everyone’s phone had text capability, of course. But phones with Internet capability began offering the ability to actually send e-mail. Today’s smart phones can do all three: voice, text message, or e-mail.For various reasons, cell phones needed to have a record of the exact time at the location of the phone, so of course they display this time. In addition, the phone can triangulate its location, and send exact geographical information to the phone company, which can be used for GPS-like services, and driving directions, etc. The only additional piece of information they need are road maps, which the phone can carry on board, or retrieve from the Internet for a small additional fee. Recently, this service is provided at very little or no cost.
Tablet Computers
Tablet computers have been around for years, but attracted little attention before the Ipad was introduced by Apple. The entire face is touch-sensitive, and it usually has no moving parts at all: no fan, no conventional disk drive. These little computers do have large capacity flash memory (the sort that is found in thumb drives), and most of them have back-lit displays. In other words, they may as well be enormous cell-phones! Note: at time of writing (May 2013) there are two types of Tablet computers: Wireless Only (which link to the internet), and 4G which also link to your phone service. The former kind, since it only uses wireless Internet, which you have already paid for separately, is less expensive to buy, and less expensive to pay for as you go along. The latter kind has to be paid for as a phone, and costs the usual $50 or so per month that a phone costs these days.When any Tablet first powers up, the touch screen shows an array of about twenty icons that you can touch with your finger, like clicking with a mouse. Each one triggers a program, such as the Internet browser, or your e-mail, or the music player, or a word-processor, or your photo album, or the settings manager (a little like Control Panel, in Windows), or almost anything you want to load on. On most tablets, you can go to a second “page” of icons by swiping from right to left, like turning a page. All your programs and most important files are represented by icons.
Once you ‘click’ on an icon, that program will usually fill up the whole screen, and you get to navigate through that program with a line of icons, either at the bottom, or across the top, just like the menu or toolbars of a conventional program. If text input is required, as you would in a word-processing program, a keyboard pops up at the bottom. There are ‘shift’ buttons, which switch the keyboard from lower-case to upper-case, or to symbols and numbers. There is usually a button that removes (“dismisses”) the keyboard, and you’re back to using your finger like a mouse.
Around the edge of the pad there are sockets for various things: the power cord for charging it, a socket for earphones, a socket for a flash-card, possibly an HDMI connector for output to a TV, and so on. The fact that there are no moving parts means that the devices can run with very little power. On the other hand, they can’t supply power to a peripheral device, like a CD burner, or anything that draws power as much as a USB connector. (In the future, peripherals might draw a lot less power than they do now, in which case Tablets could connect to that new generation of peripherals.)
A well-known drawback of the Ipad family of tablets is that they don’t handle Flash Video very well, or hardly at all. Certain sorts of video can be played on a tablet PC, but for some reason flash video does not, on some tablets. (Flash video is the sort you get on YouTube.) The Ipad interface is very similar to that of the Iphone, and the operating systems of the two are essentially the same. It is possible, as mentioned earlier, to get an Ipad with phone capability, so that you can connect to the Internet even when you’re nowhere near a wireless hot-spot, using cell service. Basically it is as though you’re connected through a ‘modem’ via the phone service (though the connection is direct, and nothing at all like a traditional modem. (Modems actually used sound, long ago, but it has been a long time since computers connecting through a phone line actually used sound, though Fax machines still continue to use an audio signal. It won’t be long before Fax machines are replaced with something a little more sane.)
Blue Tooth
Both Tablets and Phones connect to each other and to printers and keyboards and mice and so on using a certain short-range variety of wireless called BlueTooth. BlueTooth is a special kind of wireless that needs two devices to be “paired together”; each device must identify the other positively, after which they merrily continue to be linked through a little private wireless connection provided they’re close to each other, within a few feet. This is an easy way for a tablet or a phone to connect to a printer, for instance, and wires are not needed.
The pairing process is sort of interesting. Each device has to be set to ‘find’ the other. Any Bluetooth device in the vicinity could be paired with any other, so there has to be some method for one of them to establish the identity of the desired partner. If a Bluetooth mouse is to be paired with a computer, for instance, the computer insists that the mouse should click on a particular spot. If that is done successfully, the computer singles out the signal from that mouse, and ignores all other Bluetooth-type signals it may be getting. In a crowded office with many Bluetooth mice and computers, this is obviously quite a trick. But wireless communications are pretty sophisticated now; consider that a single cell tower is linked to hundreds of cellphones, but manages to get the right message to a given phone most of the time. This is all part of the wireless encoding technology.
E-readers such as Nook and Kindle and Kobo (and earlier, Sony E-reader) are special-purpose tablets, with a tablet display especially designed for ease of reading text. Some of them have buttons for turning pages and selecting the book, others use a touch-sensitive screen. There is flash memory built in that holds the book displaying program, as well as the books, usually a few Gigabytes. A single book is usually about half a megabyte, so a single Gigabyte can hold 2000 books of that size. (Books with illustrations will be much bigger.) Some e-readers are black-and-white, others are full color; some need light to be read from, others have internal illumination, such as the Nook Glow.
Ipods and MP3 players are little devices on which you can store music files. They have a socket for headphones, and a little screen with a menu, and a couple of buttons with which you scroll around to find the tune you want. You get to play a single song, a playlist of songs, a whole album, or go through your entire collection in any desired order, or randomly. You can either connect them to your computer with a USB link, or using Bluetooth, or by inserting a flash card into it. If you connect it to your computer, software on the computer can be used to organize the music files in folders, make a database of them, locate information on them from the Internet, and even buy new music from various provided, e.g. Amazon, Google, or Itunes. My entire collection can probably be saved in 64Gb of storage on a MP3 player. (Each piece is around 1 Megabyte, or 3 Mb for large-scale classical works.)
Software
Because of the close similarity between the Ios used on Ipads and Iphones on one hand, and Android used on Droids and Android tablets such as Xoom and Kindle and Nook e-readers on the other, using a Droid feels very much like using a Xoom tablet. (I really haven’t used one, but this is what I’m told: they’re quite similar.) It is no surprise that the programs that run on phones and tablets are similar. In fact, when my wife got her Iphone, she was surprised to find that all her purchases of music and games and software from Itunes (which is an online store for all sorts of things that run on Iphones and even on PC computers) would be automatically loaded onto her Iphone as soon as she logged in, without further intervention. Apple products are all designed that way: the gadget starts working without the user having to wait to find out how to use it properly. In contrast, for Android, there is a brief but significant wait time until you figure it out.Phone, Text
The phone and text messaging is very intuitive. There are icons on both kinds of systems that are fairly self-explanatory. There is a stack of people whom you called most recently (or who called you); you get to select one of these, or one from your “favorites”, or your “contacts”, or a new number directly from the keypad. Then you start talking when your party picks up, if your calling, or you get to type in your message, if you’re texting.Browsing, and E-mail
On Ios, the preferred, pre-packaged browser is usually Safari, but you can download any browser you want. The pages you see are scaled-down versions of the page you would get on a computer, unless it is a page that has a special “App”, which is essentially a web-page written specifically to look good on a phone or a tablet, using an interface that has a family resemblance to all the other Iphone Apps, or Droid Apps. The Facebook page, for instance, is missing the side columns with the advertisements; instead, the advertisements are at the foot of the page, or interspersed right between the posts of your friends.
A lot of us have personal e-mail accounts on a website. On the phones and the tablets, the e-mail is a separate app, designed specifically for a phone or a tablet, with all the other paraphernalia removed, or put in a hierarchy of menus that only expand on demand, because the usual nonsense takes up too much space, and space is at a premium.
The browser always remembers where you were when you opened it up last, and that’s what it opens up, rather than a home screen.
On Android, the Search engine is Google, by default, and is a separate App (application, meaning program) entirely, tailored for phone / tablet use. In fact, you can talk at the screen, and it figures what you’re searching for by voice interpretation.
Common Websites
Popular Web destinations, such as Imdb, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, NFL Today, CNN, and so on, all have dedicated icons, and you go directly to them without going through the Browser.Other Apps
There are some interesting application that Junior discovered:Shazam: this one identifies tunes that are playing near you. You activate the program, and hold it up to the source of the music, and after a few seconds it displays the title and the performer, and offers to sell it to you.
Nook: this is an e-book reader, and if you have a Nook account with Barnes and Nobles, it has your library ready to go. You can either read them off the cloud (in this case, the server at Barnes and Noble), or download the books to the filespace on your phone or tablet.
Kindle: similar to the above
Sudoku: There are several alternative implementations of this game, that provides random puzzles for you to solve.
Camera: Most phones come with a camera, with both forward-facing and backward-facing lenses. There is a button icon which you press, and you get a photo, or even a video. You can choose to keep or discard.
Note Everything: A multi-purpose recording program that records video, sound, doodles, or typed-in text.
Amazon MP3: Plays MP3’s you’ve bought from Amazon, or browses for new purchases.
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| Created by the Fractal app |
Calendar: A calendar program. You get to set alarms to remind you of events you program in advance.
Calculator: Most phones have a basic calculator. Optionally you can download a free App that emulates a graphing calculator, that will draw curves and surfaces.
Gallery: A gallery of photos you’ve taken, or downloaded.
Fractals: A number of programs that will generate fractals for you, most commonly of the Mandelbrot Set, a furiously complicated set of points on the XY plane, discovered by the late Benoit Mandelbrot.
Quick Office: Basic implementations of the most common Microsoft Office Suite programs, e.g. PowerPoint, Word, Excel. Make a slide presentation from your photos, text, and material from the Internet, in fact, practically anything within reach of your phone.
Skype: The popular Video chat program, now implemented for hand-held phones and Tablets. You can make space-age video calls to your friends, provided they have Skype installed.
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