Motorola Q
You may have seen all the excitement and hype across the gadget sites these past few days around the Motorola Q. To understand why check out Verizon’s flash demo –
http://www.vzwshop.com/q/
Why is this important to education? I’m willing to bet this will be the device that you see students start carrying. It has a really nice form factor and the price is 199$ with a 2 year contract (after rebate). I look at this as a great opportunity for Universities to leverage their .NET skills to build Smartphone applications that deliver on all the things we’ve been talking about in meetings for the past couple of years.
Possible Applications:
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Mobile campus portal for news and announcements
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Triangulate position on campus maps
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Integrate with back end SIS to retrieve class schedule, securely check grades
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Integrate with D2L, Blackboard, etc
And of course many times we have discussed device agnostic solutions such as:
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SMS/MMS messages for campus security alerts
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VOIP/SMS call downs for important campus announcements
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VOIP/SMS tools for distribution on information to lists, such as class reschedule, change room, or cancelations
We have partners developing really interesting solutions for all of these ideas and more. Just last week I heard one of our go-to Sharepoint partners has developed a web part for publishing podcasts. The Q includes Windows Media Player 10. Why not carry one device for your phone, pda, and portable music player?
