Survey on information appliances

Information appliances take computing off the desk-top and into our everyday world. The article reviews current applications and predicts where they will lead in the near future. It classifies the use of information appliances into the following four categories: home use; office use; mobile professionals; specialist occupations. Common to all these categories is the importance of wireless communication. The real value of an information appliance is the ability to connect to the global flow of information, which currently means the Internet and the World Wide Web. Information appliances serve as filtering mechanisms for the presentation of a narrow range of data. This is the equivalent of the specialist information tool in our traditional thinking about appliances. The following list provides some good examples of both typical information appliances and systems that use them. The article discusses these types of information appliances in more detail: electronic books; portable global positioning devices; Internet-enabled cellular phones; WebTV and home entertainment; PDAs enabled with wireless connectivity; embedded Web servers; smart rooms; and wearable computers.