Category Archives: iphone

apple, iphone, ipod touch, m-learning

University of the future?

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Abilene Christian University (ACU) have announced that they would be issuing iPhones or iPod Touches to incoming freshman for use in their college courses and day to day lives.

At ACU – the first university in the nation to provide these cutting-edge media devices to its incoming class – freshmen will use the iPhones or iPod Touches to receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors’ offices, and check their meal and account balances – among more than 15 other useful web applications already developed, said ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts.

YouTube Video Links

For those who have inadvertently blocked YouTube

Mobile Learning – Abilene Christian University

What might a university look like with a fully deployed program of converged devices like the iPhone? Connected is one possible vision. This fictional day-in-the-life account highlights some of the potential benefits in a higher education setting when every student, faculty, and staff member is “connected.” Though the applications and functions portrayed in the film are purely speculative, they’re based on needs and ideas uncovered by our research – and we’ve already been making strides to transform this vision of mobile learning (mLearning) into reality.

Links

ACU first university in nation to provide iPhone or iPod touch to all incoming freshmen – Abilene Christian University

An Apple iPhone or iPod touch will become a central part of Abilene Christian University’s innovative learning experience this fall when all freshmen are provided one of these converged media devices, said Phil Schubert, ACU executive vice president.

Apple Working to Deploy iPhones at Universities – Mac Rumors

Abilene Christian University (ACU) announced yesterday that they would be issuing iPhones or iPod Touches to incoming freshman for use in their college courses and day to day lives.

coffee, iphone

Order your Starbucks by iPhone

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Imagine going to Starbucks having already ordered your drink from your iPhone?

Order your Starbucks by iPhone

Engadget reports on an application for the iPhone which allows you to place an order for a drink so it’s ready when you get there.

Quickorder, as you can probably imagine, would enable iPod touch users to swing by their local Starbucks, order up their favorite drink and avoid a good deal of that always questionable human interaction.

Just demonstrates how useful/useless an application for a mobile device can be.

If you can order coffee, there must be ways in which you can use similar technologies for learning.

iphone, mobile

Apple iPhone’s Ease of Use Encouraging Mobile Internet Usage

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Apple iPhone's Ease of Use Encouraging Mobile Internet Usage

Macrumors reports on how the fact that it is so much easier to use the internet on the iPhone that this is encouraging more people to access the internet on their iPhone.

Indeed, it appears that iPhone owners are using the internet many times more than their non-iPhone counterparts. Google revealed that there are 50 times more searches originating from the iPhone than any other mobile handset. The discrepancy was so great that Google initially thought it was a mistake. This finding has also been reported by O2 who found that 60% of U.K. iPhone users are sending or receiving more than 25 MB of data a month.

Read more.

apple, iphone, ipod touch

New Apple products announced

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Those who know me will know that I am a bit of a fan of Apple products, not exclusively, but I do like good design and stylish kit.

Yesterday in San Francisco at MacWorld Expo, Apple announced some new products and upgrades for the iPod touch and iPhone.

Key new product announced at the keynote was the MacBook Air, a small light MacBook.

New Apple products announced

I do like small computers, great fan of the 10″ Sony VAIO laptops, however this is slightly bigger than I would like, and I can’t see how that would survive travelling by air or train.

Don’t get me wrong I think it’s very stylish, well designed, but doesn’t meet my needs for a small portable computer for use at conferences, on the train and in coffee shops.

No rumoured touchscreen, nor a Blu-ray drive either (actually no optical drive, though cleverly you can use your other Mac’s drive wirelessly, which is a very clever piece of software and something I would like to use with Windows UMPCs).

There was also upgrades for the iPhone and iPod touch announced which provide additional applications, annoyingly free on the iPhone and a £12.99 upgrade for the iPod touch.

Huh!

Probably worth it for the e-mail and notes applications which make the iPod touch a more interactive device.

Also announced was a new Airport Extreme base station which comes with a 500GB or 1TB drive for Time Machine backups.

On the Americans get the opportunity to rent films, here in the UK we don’t.

iphone, news

T-Mobile to open up iPhone sales

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BBC reports that T-Mobile to open up iPhone sales.

T-Mobile is to start allowing German customers to buy Apple’s iPhone without a contract to its network, as it moves to comply with a court injunction. 

However this is in Germany only and the iPhone will be twice as expensive as the contract version.

Legislation in the UK allows for locked phones, but you could import iPhones from Germany and then avoid the two year contract making it available for testing and usability.

apple, iphone, ipod touch

SDK for iPod touch too

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Yesterday I mentioned that Apple were going to allow third party applications for the iPhone. What is nice is that they are also going to allow developers using their software developers kit (SDK) to create applications for the iPod touch as well.

Apple in their press release said:

P.S.: The SDK will also allow developers to create applications for iPod touch.

Excellent, this means that developers will be able to create applications for the iPhone and the iPod touch.

Thanks Gary.

apple, iphone

Apple to allow iPhone third party applications

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Anyone who has been following the iPhone (despite it not been available in the UK until November 9th) will know that one of the complaints about the iPhone was the lack of third party applications.

iPhone

Now some clever people managed to “hack” the iPhone to allow third party applications, this was recently broken by an update from Apple.

It is now been reported that Apple have announced that they will be allowing third party application development.

Apple boss Steve Jobs has said that outside developers will now be allowed to make add-on software for the iPhone.

“We are excited about creating a vibrant third party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users,” said Mr Jobs.

This will be useful for those who are interested in using the iPhone for educational purposes as now educational or learning applications could be created.

I wonder also if such applications could work on the iPod touch, I am guessing no.

Photo source

apple, iphone, news

iPhone launched in the UK – November 9th

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Apple have announced that they are launching the iPhone in the UK. It will go on sale on November 9th on the O2 network.

“We picked the best one, the most popular carrier, it’s O2. We’ve since lowered the price of the US phone of the 8GB phone, in the UK the price of the iPhone is £269 including VAT.”

That’s a lot of money for a phone, be interesting to see what the data costs will be?

apple, iphone, news

UK iPhone Launch???

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As I write it’s about five minutes before the Apple event at the Apple Store in London gets underway.

Generally it is accepted that this will be the launch of the iPhone in Europe.

It will be interesting to see if it is a 3G version or whether the fact that O2 have been upgrading their network to EDGE will mean that the UK iPhone will still be EDGE only.

Not long to wait now…