Information Appliance

An information appliance (IA) is a device that focuses on handling a particular type of information and related tasks. Typical devices are smartphones and PDAs. The term is often confused with internet appliance, a type of consumer product which accesses services on the Internet.

Information appliances may overlap in definition or are sometimes referred to as smart devices, mobile devices, wireless devices, Internet appliances, web appliances, handhelds, handheld devices or smart handheld devices.
The term was coined by Jef Raskin in the early 1980s.

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. They had some of the attributes of an information appliance. One of these dedicated word processor machines was the Canon Cat, designed by Jef Raskin as the forerunner of his idea of information appliance. Raskin described some properties of his definition of information appliance in his book The Humane Interface.

The term and the ideas behind it were later explained in detail by Donald Norman in his book The Invisible Computer. Larry Ellison, Oracle Corporation CEO, predicted that information appliances and network computers, would supersede desktop PCs.

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. 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, these efforts have been less successful than predicted, due to the willingness of most vendors to work together within open standards frameworks, and the pre-existing widespread adoption of open standards such as GSM, IP, SMS and SMTP.

Related concepts

The idea of ubiquitous computing is related to the notion of information appliance because both take into account the need to design dedicated, interconnected devices from the ground up, by taking human factors as well as software and hardware issues into account. They differ on other matters such as the importance accorded to social aspects of computing.