New Tech Gadgets for College Students

Sep 25 2010

New Tech Gadgets for College Students

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Bethany Condra, 21, was wrapping up her junior year at the University of New Hampshire when disaster struck: She damaged her laptop beyond repair. With term papers and finals looming, her stepdad, a software developer, suggested she get Apple’s iPad instead—because, he said, it seemed “just the same as a laptop.” Condra took the plunge and dropped $500 on the tablet device.

A laptop it wasn’t. Condra enjoyed reading “The Canterbury Tales” in vivid color, complete with lifelike page flips—and she loved carrying a 1.5-pound tablet instead of a computer and a load of clunky textbooks. But typing notes on the touchscreen felt tar-pit slow. Condra had to buy a docking station (another $69) so she could type a Western civilization paper on a normal keyboard. And without a special “app” to connect the iPad to a printer, she had to e-mail that paper to herself and print it in the library. With senior year under way, Condra still isn’t fully committed. If note-taking still feels clumsy, she says, “I’ll go back to writing stuff down.”

It’s been 20 years since computers became more than a curiosity on campus and at least a decade since the cell phone became as commonplace as the logo sweatshirt. But now college students—and, of course, parents who may be footing the bill—have a new wave of tech decisions to make. A host of recording and transcribing gadgets offer to bridge the divide between the spoken word (Professor So-and-So’s lecture) and the written one (that paper Junior has to write). Lightweight netbooks are positioning themselves as a back-strain-free alternative to laptops. And even more potentially popular is the wave of e-readers and tablet computers, including the heavy-hitting iPad, which devotees laud as a computer and a textbook library rolled into one.

The college climate certainly gives electronics manufacturers a lot to salivate over. Student tech spending seems immune to a sluggish economy: College students spent $13 billion on electronics in 2009, up 17 percent from 2008, according to the National Retail Federation. Analysts say that having grown up in the Facebook generation, today’s undergrads put a premium on gear that’s both fully wireless and as small as possible. To play to that audience and add a wow factor, colleges are incorporating new devices into their coursework: At the University of New Mexico, for example, students in a Spanish course use iPod Touches to communicate with virtual characters (en Español) to solve a murder mystery. At the same time, the industry is making pitches to price-conscious families. Retailers are touting $400 netbooks as cheaper paper-writing options than $700 laptops. E-reader manufacturers, fresh off their own summer price war, are also waving the economizing banner; digital-textbook seller CourseSmart says its titles cost, on average, just 60 percent as much as the paper equivalents.

Still, when it comes to the basics of the college experience—reading, listening and writing—even the new devices’ biggest fans admit that it’s too early for undergrads to put all their faith in the technology. E-readers and the textbook industry are still in the awkward-dating phase of the relationship, with e-books making up only 3 percent of the course materials students use, according to the National Association of College Bookstores—in part because those devices display graphics and page numbers inconsistently (if at all). Voice-recognition software can capture a lecture with more than 80 percent accuracy—but the missing amount can often include crucial info like proper names and technical terms. And perhaps most significantly, note-taking and essay-writing on smaller touchscreen devices remain a clumsy enterprise. Tablets like the iPad “don’t quite have it nailed yet,” says Bret Ingerman, vice president for computing and information services at Vassar College.

That said, it may be only a matter of time before they iron out those kinks. Certain colleges are already betting their students’ tuition money on a more tech-heavy future, investing in wireless data networks so the new wave of devices doesn’t bog down Internet access. At Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pa., incoming freshmen are given an Apple MacBook Pro and iPad for free—but pay technology fees of $1,000 a year to support the infrastructure and service center. For those families who won’t be getting a free gadget with their course catalog, we talked to students, educators and industry analysts—and test-drove some gear ourselves. Below, some devices that might have Phi Beta Kappa potential.

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