Portable Computers
Portable computing today includes laptops, notebooks and netbooks, many weighing less than 4 pounds and providing longer battery life. The MacBook Air is a good example of this: it weighs less than three pounds
MacBook Air
and is only 0.68 inches thick! Netbooks (short for Network Books) are extremely light because they do not have a hard drive, depending instead on the Internet “cloud” for data and application storage. Netbooks depend on a Wi-Fi connection and can run Web browsers as well as a word processor. Smartphones While cell phones were introduced in the 1970s, smartphones have only been around for the past 20 years. As cell phones evolved, they gained a broader array of features and programs. Today’s smartphones provide the user with telephone, email, location, and calendar services, to name a few. They function as a highly mobile computer, able to connect to the Internet through either cell technology or Wi-Fi. Smartphones have revolutionized computing, bringing the one feature PCs and laptops could not deliver, namely mobility. Consider the following data regarding mobile computing 4 :
• There are 3.7 billion global mobile Internet users as at January 2018. • Mobile devices influenced sales to the tune of over $1.4
Information Systems for Business and Beyond (2019) pg. 36
Made with FlippingBook flipbook maker