Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Magic little phones

As a school that's interested in 21st century learning tools, we don't ban mobile phones at the gate. Far from it: we welcome students' mobile computing devices and have set our network up to accommodate them. We have banks of charging laptop locker to keep portable devices secure when they are not being used; we have a wireless network that allows any device to connect to it and we use portable devices (iPods, phones etc.) in learning wherever possible.
We've been thinking about getting iPhones for the Senior Leadership Team for a while but something kept gnawing at me: how could we as an open source school encourage the use of proprietary operating systems on smartphones? Clearly we couldn't, and we decided to put our money where our mouths were: we took possession yesterday of 5 HTC Magic phones running Google's Android OS, which is in turn based on Linux. I took it home last night and spent most of the evening playing with it and I have to say that seeing a Linux-powered phone competing function for function with an iPhone was a great feeling. (My wife has already started referring to herself as an 'Android Widow'.) Have a look at the features. It's a magic little phone.

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