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12 April 2008

iPod Touch + SDK = Tricorder?



The iPhone SDK should be out in June. However, the thing that most people don't realize is that the SDK also applies to the iPod Touch, and the myriad of practical uses. For example, the medical database shown off by Steve Jobs when he announced the SDK. Say your doctor walks in. He looks at your current health, and says he needs your health records. He can now either go off to an archive and find your file, or use his iPod Touch to search for you in a medical database, which will tell him your hereditary dispositions, your past diseases, and the treatments prescribed before for those diseases. Of course, this would require your hospital to have wireless, which most hospitals already do. It also requires a centralized storage database - a potential security risk for your health and identity records. However, if the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, it could work.
One of the reasons I think the iPod Touch is more attractive to businesses than the iPhone is because most businesses already have a phone system, possibly running VOIP over their wireless network. A company's phone system represents a significant investment, and while replacing all of its phones with iPhones would be a great undertaking, the iPod Touch fits into a different category. While mobile phones have absorbed some of the PDA market, they provide clunky interfaces for handling data. The iPod Touch's data interfaces are more sophisticated.
All in all, businesses may see the iPod Touch more as a tricorder-like device, good at managing data like a normal iPod manages songs. A few forward-thinking companies may adopt iPod Touches in a PDA-like capacity, and as the iPod Touch grows and evolves (possibly to allow add-ons in that 30 pin docking port), companies will see the value of having all of the data at your fingertips in less than the great amount of time it takes to use a phone.

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