Portable communications devices refer to hand-held or wearable devices. For example, the Walkie Talkie is a device that is hand-held when in use, and wearable when not in use. Portable telephones (cellular telephones) are also carried, or worn, on a belt, or in a pocket. A mevice (n./'mee-vyhs/) is a personal, wireless electronic device with customizable communications, applications and entertainment capabilities.
More recently, portable devices have also become usable when worn. For example, most walkie talkies come with a VOX (Voice Operated Xmit) capability so that they will work hands-free, when used with a wearable microphone. Many telephones such as the Motorola Star Tac also feature an earpiece that allows the phone to be worn and used hands-free. The Star Tac was the first wearable cellular telephone, in the sense that it was the first that could be used while being worn.
The word portable derives from the French word porter ("to wear", as in "pret a porter" = "ready to wear", but also "to carry").
Portable computers are computers that can be hand-held, used on a lap, or worn in a pocket, belt, or the like, such as Personal digital assistants (PDAs). PDAs are almost always worn (pocket or belt) when not in use, but more recently there has been a trend to having them be usable when worn (e.g. with eyeglass-based displays as well as electric seeing aids such as eyetap devices).
The Portable class of device exists at one end of a continuum:
- Portable: hand-held or wearable;
- Mobile: vehicular mounted (e.g. an automobile radiotelephone);
- Base station or desktop units: building-mounted.
According to the Oxford American Dictionary, portable is from the Old French 'portable,' which is from the Late Latin 'portabilis,' which in turn is from the Latin 'portare.'
Famous quotes containing the words portable and/or device:
“Wotever is, is right, as the young nobleman sveetly remarked wen they put him down in the pension list cos his mothers uncles vifes grandfather vunce lit the kings pipe vith a portable tinder-box.”
—Charles Dickens (18121870)
“Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)