All of that has been done pretty much in Quickoffice for Android On Sep 3, 2010 4:23 PM, "Kent Loobey" <[email protected]> wrote: iPads are beginning to show up on campus.
They have some features that make them pretty nice for college students, e.g., long battery life, the UI, etc. But they have a number of drawbacks as well. Most of the drawbacks seem to be an attempt by Apple to preserve MAC laptop sales. These however keep the iPad from being a must-have device. I have noticed is that a number of students have bought thin blue-tooth MAC keyboards. These are light and look to be handy for entering text for papers. Most of the students I talked with about these keyboards say that they just wouldn't enter much text from a soft keyboard. Some things that are necessary for a "must-have" student device are as follows. * PDF readers for papers and articles. * Power-Point ability - Almost every class has the lecture notes available to students as power-point slides. * WORD Doc file reading and writing ability - It might be acceptable to get away with ODF writing ability instead but students still need to be able to read WORD Doc files. Whatever the paper creating software is on the tablet it should support templates, spell check, footnotes, etc. ANNOTATION ABILITY EVERYWHERE - This is a must have feature for students. Search ability within all documents. Think back to when you were a student, you want to be able to circle items, add links to references, URLs and dictionary entries, hi-lite text, etc. These are really necessary. I think it would also be really helpful for students to be able to create a searchable index to specific points within articles. Be able to create papers, animations, and videos on the table. Be able to print anything from the tablet. I know that Google is into cloud computing but having 300 students in a lecture all trying to run the same program at the same time off the net can be problematic. It really is possible to create a tablet device that every student would just have to have. I am not saying that they would want to have one, I am saying that they just couldn't go to college without one. Right now this is true for them for a laptop but really laptops are clunky, heavy, and crude in comparison. If convenient Open Source PDF, Power-Point, and WORD alternatives were available on the tablet then supporting these formats wouldn't be necessary. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]<android-discuss%[email protected]> . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-discuss?hl=en.
