Quote:
Originally Posted by KenK
Why would you want to do this all on a single tablet device? It seems it would be much easier to dedicate one cheap netbook for data acquisition, and the tablet for references. It's often better to have dedicated specialized devices than one all-in-one device. (For example, I'm about to get back to work here in my home office and I'll be using 3 computers; writing a paper on one while reading the handwritten memos I made on my previous version of the paper on my tablet PC. The 3rd computer is mainly for playing music.
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Because as a student ( I used to be one 20 years ago...) I only have so much money. I also only want to carry around a few things, such as my cell phone, my mp3 player, my books, and working materials. The vision as I see it is to give the student something that he will easily adopt into his bag. Even though seperate devices might do a better job, it is often not that ergonomic when it comes to lugging it around campus.
In my work scenario, I minimize the number of things that I take to meetings. Now I agree with you that for my own private Science room, I definately want as much power in devices as possible. Now that goes the other way when I have to lug it out as if I want to automate a portable telescope in the field.
It all depends on what you plan to do. As a teacher, I could see having 20 Edges which I fold up into a lab cart. When I do a lab, it has the reference material on it. It has the ports available for any data acquisition devices that I need to use for the lab. It has wifi access to all of the supplemental material the teacher wants to make available say via a lab server. It has an operating system with a simple but robust programming paradigm available for buying software or making programming which round out the tools.
As a teacher, I wouldn't need to use it but I could minimize when I want to. I can take the Edge into my dedicated lab and just use it for the dedicate reference materials with other computers for the heavy lifting, but I am not only limited to that task.