Personal and Portable Computing Devices

Personal and portable computing devices are the computers, phones and handheld electronics built for use by one person, at a desk, on the move or in the hand, rather than as shared institutional equipment. The class spans desktop personal computers designed to sit in a home or office, laptop computers built to fold shut and travel, personal digital assistants and their successor smartphones that combine communication and computing in a pocket sized device, dedicated handheld game consoles, and portable media players built to carry a music or video library. What unifies the class is the shift computer engineering made from a machine one institution shared among many users to a machine one person owns and carries, a shift that reshaped hardware design around battery life, weight, screen size and wireless connectivity over the closing decades of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty first.