tablets are one of the most popular categories of mobile devices today and they're usually running an operating system such as iOS or Android they're usually about seven inches diagonal or larger and we're using touchscreen access on these devices you can see they don't have a keyboard there's no mouse associated with this we might also have stylus or other types of input as well depending on the device itself these tablets can support a wide range of different applications everything from productivity to games or utilities and they're very good at taking pictures or watching movies or other
types of media that you might want to use on this tablet device perhaps the most popular mobile device today is the smartphone this is our mobile communication hub we can make phone calls we can text we can send emails all from this very small three-and-a-half inch to about six inch diagonal device this makes a very good media viewer as well we can watch movies and watch videos on these devices and of course if we're traveling this is great for getting maps and travel information and you can run many different kinds of applications on these as
well everything from specialized apps to games and so much more wearable technology would be a mobile device that you could wear somewhere on a person so it might be a SmartWatch for example which takes the place of the traditional mechanical watches and usually it integrates with our mobile devices such as our mobile phones and our tablets another popular wearable device is the fitness monitor so we're able to track our heart rate we can see how much we've walked or run today and see been able to see how our sleep patterns are working because it knows
when we're moving and when we're not moving with virtual reality devices we're completely removing the real world and entering a virtual world you can see this display that you put on doesn't allow you to see anything that's outside of that particular screen with virtual reality it's common to use input devices that you would use outside of that display but all of this input is occurring inside of the virtual world this is useful if you'd like to play games there's industrial design applications some applications where you can create art in this virtual world and because you're
able to move around and look in different places it enhances the ability to watch videos and to view images all in this virtual environment if you wanted to combine the virtual world and the real world you would have augmented reality this is usually accomplished by wearing a special kind of eyeglass or perhaps you're looking through a screen of a tablet or mobile phone this will allow you to see things that are in the real world but the computer would augment or add additional information to the things that you're seeing through that device an example of
augmented reality in medicine might be where you're putting on special glasses and able to see an x-ray that's superimposed on the patient itself or maybe you're traveling and as you're going from place to place you can see messages pop up on buildings or on roads to tell you where you happen to be and you might be able to use this in gaming or part of the real world suddenly becomes part of your game an e-reader is a mobile device that is specifically created to read books it might have some capabilities to play music or perform
some application use but most of what you're doing with an e-reader all revolves around book reading instead of using a color LCD screen Erie's use a technology called electronic paper this is a black and white screen that is designed to perform extremely well in direct light one interesting characteristic of these e-readers is that they have an exceptionally long battery life when you're reading information on the screen you're not using any of the battery the only time the battery is used is when you change pages and that information updates on the screen these readers almost exclusively
use wireless connectivity so they may be downloading and updating book information from a Wi-Fi network or a cellular network and another category of mobile device is a Global Positioning System device a GPS this is an in-car navigation that gives you turn by turn directions on where you need to go it does require that you have a view of the sky so the able to receive signals from the multiple GPS satellites this also requires that you update this information because our streets and our roads are constantly updated so usually will have an over-the-air update that would
occur through a wireless network or perhaps there's a memory card that we would install in the GPS to be able to perform this update you
