In its bid to become the cord-cutting service of choice, Amazon UK has confirmed it’s bringing Channel add-ons to the UK. The service allows Prime subscribers to bolt subscriptions from various UK TV services onto their account, without the need for…
The newest TV technology is a stretchable OLED display, a patent troll lawyer meets karma, and this week we’re talking about Tomorrow. No, not Wednesday, the conceptual one.
Many of the elderly of today were in their prime during the dawn of the Internet Age. As a result, seniors are a bit more receptive to the idea of accessing the web and utilizing personal technology than those their age of a decade or so ago. Luddites are becoming few and far between.
However, when it comes to the peak of modern mobile tech – tablets and smartphones – there exists an interesting dynamic among older demographics:
As many readers may already know from personal experience and anecdotal evidence, iPads and other tablets are hot items among seniors. It’s not unusual to see a woman in her late-70s checking the news on a tablet while riding the bus. Millions of grandpas, grandmas, and great-grandparents count on their tablets to stay in touch with loved ones via Facebook and Skype.
On the other hand, when was the last time you saw a 70-something-year-old man, or any senior for that matter, nose-down looking at an iPhone? Can you picture visiting your grandmother and finding her with earbuds on, thumbs downing Pandora tracks in between scrolling through her social media feed? While outlier instances no doubt exist and plenty of seniors own smartphones, it’s certainly not a common observation. If “spot the senior glued to his smartphone” were part of a drinking game it’d make for a sober evening.
There is no shortage of data suggesting more seniors own smartphones now than ever before. However, they are rarely utilized beyond basic phone calls and text messaging, functions which can be found on flip phone technology. It’s no surprise Jitterbug and other flip phone solutions remain hot sellers among senior citizens. They provide everything many elderly consumers want from a cell phone without making it too complicated.
Okay, but hold up – aren’t tablets and smartphones basically the same thing? Sure, tablets are a little more square and a little less rectangle, but apart from that and the obvious size differences, the concept is essentially the same. The only real difference internally is the inclusion of a dedicated service carrier system for smartphones and the superior computing power of tablets.
With this in mind, one has to wonder why tablet usage among seniors has been exceptionally growing in a consistent pattern the last several years while smartphones seem to stay in their pockets or skipped over entirely in favor of flip phones. These generations watched computers go from the size of living rooms to fitting on top of our laps, it can’t be that much of a leap for them to go from tablets to smartphones.
It turns out several factors go into why most seniors can get behind iPads but will be completely content with keeping their flip phone. One reason is something most of us can understand about getting older: deteriorating vision. It’s not easy discerning the details on a 4.5-inch smartphone screen packed with information with 70-year-old eyes. It is, however, not as difficult to spend hours looking at a screen twice that size.
Then there’s handling. Thanks to arthritis and other causes of hand swelling and reduce dexterity that become more common as we age, it’s not exactly a cinch for seniors to scroll on a smartphone single-fingered without hitting the wrong links, buttons, etc. Double the size of these same tabs and icons and it gets much easier.
Lastly, tablets are a lot like newspapers and magazines, which up until even as recently as five years ago were the primary sources of information for Baby Boomers and those older. They’re familiar in terms of how information is consumed, which is pretty important for people of any age. Smartphones, however, don’t compute so to speak with the comfort level expected from most seniors. Flip phones, to the typical senior, represent what cell phones were like when their generations were the first to use them. They’re flat out more familiar.
Interestingly enough, it’s worth finishing by making mention of the resurgence of flip phone popularity among youth. The seemingly unrelatable generations alive today might have more in common than they think, even with technology.
The post Seniors Love Tablets but Remain Skeptical About Smartphones appeared first on TechFresh, Consumer Electronics Guide.
President Donald Trump said Monday’s deadly explosion in Manchester, England was the work of “evil losers.”
“I won’t call them monsters, because they would like that term… they’re losers, just remember that,” he said Tuesday during a press conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Trump met with Abbas in Bethlehem after meeting with Israeli leaders in Jerusalem on Monday.
“We stand in absolute solidarity with the people of the United Kingdom,” Trump said.
The blast at a concert by American pop singer Ariana Grande killed at least 22 people and wounded over 50, according to U.K. police. Police said the incident is “being treated as a terrorist incident.”
First Lady Melania Trump also expressed sympathies for those affected by the attack.
Trump’s visit to Jerusalem and Bethlehem is part of his first foreign trip as president. On Monday, he became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Western Wall. He also met with leaders in Saudi Arabia over the weekend.
The blast comes a little over two months after a deadly terror attack outside the Houses of Parliament in London that killed five people, including the assailant, and injured more than 40.
Mollie Reilly contributed reporting.
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Fake news swept across the internet in the aftermath of a deadly explosion at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, on Monday night.
An attacker killed 22 people and injured dozens more, police say. Many used social media to offer and appeal for help, others used it as an opportunity to troll and put out false information.
Reports that a gunman was on the loose at a nearby hospital, that Grande had been injured in the blast and that she had immediately retired from music all circulated within hours of the explosion which British police are treating as a terrorist incident.
Here’s a round up of the fake news stories to watch out for so far:
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Former CIA director James Woolsey, who advised Donald Trump during his campaign and transition, used unfolding news of the deadly attack in Manchester, England, to slam the president’s predecessor, Barack Obama.
In comments that Media Matters posted online, Woolsey told Fox News anchor Shepard Smith:
“Things are kind of coming to a head. I think the radical Islamists ― and I would call them that ― have decided to pick up the pace with the terrorist attacks, and I think we’ll probably see some more.
And we now have a president who is pretty straightforward that he is at war with them. He’s not going to soft-pedal that. He calls them evil. And we haven’t had a situation like that. We did not have in the eight years of the Obama administration a president who wanted to fight and win a war.”
Smith cut him off.
“President Obama fought a number of wars and certainly didn’t say that he didn’t want to win them,” he said. “It’s very early, Mr. Woolsey, with great respect, it’s very early to make this a political matter.”
Woolsey continued.
“He didn’t say that he didn’t want to win them, but I think that’s the way he behaved,” he said. “Seems to me that’s pretty straightforward.”
Woolsey, who was CIA director under former President Bill Clinton, joined the Trump campaign in September and served on the transition team until a couple of weeks before the transition, when he resigned amid what The Washington Post called “growing tensions over Trump’s vision for intelligence agencies.”
(H/T Mediaite)
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President Donald Trump’s (spoof) postcards are something to write home about.
On Monday’s “Late Show,” Stephen Colbert imagined the kind of missives that Trump is sending back to his friends and family in the U.S. during his nine-day jaunt to the Middle East and Western Europe.
“I keep getting ‘Hamas’ and ‘Hummus’ confused,” he pens to National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.
Check out the rest of the postcards in the clip above.
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— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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