Mobile devices is something that shook the world, specially the smartphones. These are some devices that people have been waiting for years before they finally hit the market.
There were mobile devices, but they served some specific purpose rather than the all-in-one mini beasts you can have in your pocket now. This is no secret that how smartphones, tablets, smart watches enable people to get access to set of unique features and tools from anywhere in the world and perform some essential tasks just like that.
What are mobile devices?
One of the challenging thing about this device is to define the mobile device itself. What is a mobile device? You could describe this device in terms of its functionality and capabilities. Typically, the following points are, somewhat, can be described for mobile devices.
- Lightweight
- Small in size and designed to fit your pocket
- Have touch or stylus
- Are made of sealed components
- Have separate mobile operating systems different from desktop computer operating system
Your portable computer device like laptops will invariably have operating system like Windows, Linux or macOS, whereas a legit mobile device will always have either an android OS or an iOS. Although, there are mobile devices which has desktop operating system like Windows phone or Google Chrome OS but they are you know, just there looking at you, which is rare.
Now let’s take a look at the various form factors and some specific hardware that makes up the mobile devices.
Purpose-built mobile devices
There are other mobile devices out there as mentioned earlier. These devices are not focused on being multi-purpose goody as of those general purpose mobile devices. Which one is better depends solely on your need. Typically, you will be able to get by so well with a general purpose devices taking care of the same task that you are doing with the purpose-built devices.
Still, some prefer due to the fact that, general-purpose devices can be distracting since there are just too many options to pick from or some other circumstances. For instance, you set your mind to read a book for 30 minutes straight, u picked up the phone started reading it, you are likely to get notifications, pop ups, calls and other distracting apps you love to get or maybe picking up the phone reminds you of the unfinished game. This is where people starts looking for purpose-built devices.
E-readers
E-reader are purpose-built mobile devices which are designed to accommodate electronic books on this device, which is known as E-books. They typically have low powered grayscale screen technology known as e-paper and a straight forward interface design to get new e-books. There are features like navigating through them, bookmarking, highlighting, passage sharing, notes as well as looking up definitions and such tasks. At first these e-readers had hardware buttons but they transitioned to the complete touchscreen feature. For instance, Amazon’s Kindle Paperwhite.
Over the years, some e-readers have grown to include full blown tablets. Big shots in this line like Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook all started with simple black and white devices which now include tablets as well. Tablets are great at general purpose computing while e-readers are built to have optimized environment for reading. For example, long battery life span which can be measured in days, weeks. Screens are designed to give the user comfortable feelings while reading for hours on in a range of lighting conditions.