Remember that scene in Starship Troopers where a one-armed Michael Ironside lectures students about the differences between a citizen and a civilian?
It was meant to be a pivotal scene, something about totalitarianism or whatnot, but we weren’t paying attention back in 1997. We were more interested in those touchscreen tablets that Denise Richards and Casper Van Dien were using to scrawl high tech love notes to each other.
If only our schooldays had been a bit more like that, tablets, laser pens and facist overtones *sigh*.
But if HTC’s Florian Seiche has his way, we could well be seeing this within five years.
Speaking at Reuters’ Global Technology Summit, HTC’s European president, Florian Seiche said that “In five years’ time, schools will have tablets probably instead of physical notebooks. I think that’s going to be such a massive wave of additional penetration in society… I think we can’t even guess the potential.”
We’re not sure about five years time, but we can definitely see room for tablets or tablet-style devices in schools.
Thanks to OCR recognition, you could scan in entire quotes from textbooks to go in your essays and bibliographies and you could start on your homework on your tablet at school, sync your notes to the cloud and carry on working at home. Actually, you can do this now on your Android phone with Google Docs. So maybe five years isn’t too far fetched.
As well as this, Seiche also mentioned that HTC is working on an NFC-enabled phone that could come out within the next 12 months, joining Samsung’s Nexus S and the forthcoming NFC version of the Galaxy S2.
Seiche also touched on the Nokia/Microsoft partnership, saying that the deal “will not change our commitment to Microsoft… With a new player entering, it should actually help to elevate the relevance of that platform… we should be able to benefit.”
Leaked details of what could be the first of HTC’s next Windows Phone 7 efforts, dubbed the HTC Bresson have already begun to emerge.
We’ve contacted HTC for some further info on its future tablet plans and if it has any knowledge of an impending alien bug invasion. Until we hear back, feel free to enjoy this thoughtful rumination on the body politic. Or something.
Source: Reuters via Boy Genius Report
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