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Technology Trends
Dialing Up the Future for iPhones on Campus
2/1/2007
An interview with Jay Dominick, Wake Forest University[Editor's note: Jay Dominick will present an update on MobileU and converged devices at this coming summer's Campus Technology 2007 http://campustechnology.com/conferences/summer2007 conference in Washington, DC, July 30-August 2.]
At Macworld in San Francisco earlier this month, Steve Jobs delivered a keynote unveiling Apple’s iPhone. Consumers can line up to get them this coming June. But what does the announcement mean to the higher education market? CT spoke with Wake Forest University Assistant Vice President and CIO Jay Dominick for some insights.
CT: How was the announcement of the iPhone received on your campus?
DOMINICK: I would say the iPhone is probably the biggest technology announcement in the past year. It has generated a phenomenal amount of interest, certainly all across our campus—I’ve received many e-mails from our faculty and from the technical staff saying, “Check this out! What do you think?” So it’s created a lot of energy and buzz.
CT: How will the availability of this new phone, which is supposed to ship in June, affect your planning?
DOMINICK: We’ve had [converged] cell phone/PDA pilot programs MobileU here for a couple of years, and one of the big challenges we’ve seen is user interface issues. I think if Apple can address the interface issues surrounding smaller devices—like cell phones or PDAs—they will have a very, very interesting and applicable product for higher education.
But the iPhone is still a little bit of a “vapor” product right now. We haven’t seen yet how it’s going to work, or whether or not it’s going to be open enough to write applications for it. It’s more ethereal than substantive at this point. When we start to get our hands on these things and begin to understand how they actually work, we’ll have a better idea of what the utility of the device is going to be.
CT: There’s a lot of interest in the consumer market for the iPhone. How will this translate to student demands?
DOMINICK: It’s certainly going to be the “buzz” product of the summer for our incoming students. So, to a certain extent we are going to deal with these things whether we had planned to or not.
CT: You selected Cingular--which will soon be known by the AT&T name--as your provider at Wake Forest University. Apple announced its partnership with Cingular in launching the new iPhone. Will you be supporting the iPhone in your MobileU project?
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