Information appliance

An information appliance (IA) is an appliance that is designed to easily perform a specific electronic function such as playing music,photography, or editing text.

Typical examples are smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). Information appliances partially overlap in definition with, or are sometimes referred to as smart devices, embedded systems, mobile devices or wireless devices.

Appliance vs computer

The term information appliance was coined by Jef Raskin around 1979. As later explained by Donald Norman in his influential The Invisible Computer, the main characteristics of IA, as opposed to any normal computer, were:

• designed and pre-configured for a single application (like a toaster appliance, which is designed only to make toast),
• so easy to use for untrained people, that it effectively becomes unnoticeable, "invisible" to them,
• able to automatically share information with any other IAs.

This definition of IA was different from today's. Jef Raskin initially tried to include such features in the Apple Macintosh, which he designed, but eventually the project went a quite different way. For a short while during the mid- and late 1980s, there were a few models of simple electronic typewriters with screens and some form of memory storage. These dedicated word processor machines had some of the attributes of an information appliance, and Raskin designed one of them, the Canon Cat. He described some properties of his definition of information appliance in his book The Humane Interface.

Larry Ellison, Oracle Corporation CEO, predicted that information appliances and network computers would supersede personal computers (PCs). This prediction has not yet come true.

Walled gardens versus open standards

In an ideal world, any true information appliance would be able to communicate with any other information appliance using open standard protocols and technologies, regardless of the maker of the software or the hardware.^{[citation needed]} The communications aspects and all user interface elements would be designed together so that a user could switch seamlessly from one information appliance to another.

Some vendors are attempting to create "walled gardens" of closed proprietary content for information appliances, leveraging existing proprietary technologies. However, with the exception of NTT DoCoMo's i-mode and Apple's App Store, these efforts have been less successful than predicted, due to the willingness of most vendors to work together within open standards frameworks,^{[citation needed]} and the pre-existing widespread adoption of open standards such as GSM, IP, SMS and SMTP.