Category: Gadgets

The company’s estimates have shown that tablets are becoming an important part of education.

The vice president of Hewlett Packard has recently released a statement that has shown that the use of mobile technology will be important to preparing students for life in the workplace, and he accompanied this prediction with an estimate of how much U.K. schools will be spending on this equipment.

In fact, in 2015, alone, HP has estimated that schools in the United Kingdom will spend £196 million on this tech.

According to Gus Schmedlen, the HP vice president of worldwide education, printing and personal systems, said that many schools have been adopting an attitude to “wait and see” how things go with new mobile technology devices, but they have been highly influenced by the trends being set by early adopters. Schmedlen stated that schools would be starting to make the digital leap forward.

HP feels that the time has arrived for schools to start using mobile technology as a part of overall education.

Schmedlen explained that “IT is an essential part of learning as it allows pupils to understand concepts such as the sourcing of information, skills such as coding and also prepares them for the workplace.” He went on state that “Additionally for the teacher, IT provides a value-add by attracting students’ attention as well as motivating, enhancing and complementing learning.”

HP feels that the use of mobile tech is going to change the way students receive their educations, saying that ongoing assessment of the use of various types of devices is going to play a vital role in moving ahead.

The statement released by Schmedlen expressed that using technology for formative assessment can give teachers feedback in real time (or close to real time), so that interventions and adaptations in the teaching strategy can be put into place in a timely manner, instead of having to wait until the end of a term or a lesson, when final testing and overall scores are tallied.

The idea is that mobile technology can allow the right actions to be taken throughout the learning process, instead of waiting until a child is already failing.

At the same time that Apple’s profits are breaking records, this company’s execs didn’t have the same news.

According to the news on the latest mobile trends from Samsung when the South Korean company’s fourth quarter financial results were released, there was a 23 percent drop in smartphone, tablet, and wearable technology based revenues when compared to the same time in 2013.

During that same period, the mobile profits at the company fell even more dramatically, dropping by 64 percent.

In that fourth quarter, Samsung posted earnings of $1.8 billion. This mobile trend has been a continuing one for the company that has been experiencing a growing struggle in selling its less expensive smartphones in emerging markets, where there is notable competition in cheaply priced devices from rapidly growing brands in the tech industry such as Xiaomi. Moreover, Samsung has also placed itself at risk by moving toward powering its first phone with its Tizen operating system. Recent reports have indicated that the recent launch of that OS may not have been quite as positive as the company had likely hoped.

At the same time, the mobile trends with regards to the higher end offerings at Samsung aren’t looking much better.

At the same time that Apple’s popularity and successes have been skyrocketing since it has launched its larger screened iPhone 6 devices, Samsung’s high end devices have been continuing to do well, but not nearly to the degree of its top competition.

At the same time, it is important to note that while the growth may have slowed down by quite a bit, Samsung is far from seeing an all out halt in its unit sales. Recently, analysts from the Wall Street Journal predicted that the company had sold somewhere between 74 and 77 million smartphones within the last quarter of last year. That may be a notable stumble from the 86 million that were sold the year before in the same quarter, but it remains an exceptionally large figure.

It is clear that the mobile trends at Samsung are headed downward, but the size of the company’s sales still provides room for the brand to turn things around.