THAT THE GREATEST SPUR
TO ADVANCING COMPUTER
TECHNOLOGY WAS OUR
FRUSTRATION WITH IT?
Back in the 1980s, computers came with
required reading: thick manuals written
in a language that wasn’t quite English.
You had to wonder at the drain on your
time, your pocketbook, your very sanity.
But today, Canon’s old slogan is finally
nearing fulfillment. Technology truly is
“so advanced it’s simple”—and it really can
simplify your life. Whether you’re loading
the latest app onto your phone or exploring a new social network, you can usually
intuit how to get into it. Very into it.
Now that technology fits the user, not
the other way around, the challenge is
different: There’s so much digital life out
there, how do you discover what’s truly
worth your time and your dollar?
On these pages and online at
aarp.org/tech you’ll find
our guide to getting your
bearings—with enough
to orient the
technophobes, entice
the Twitterati, and
make life several
gigabytes better for
everyone in between.
TECHSPEAK
BYTE COUNT
Kilobyte (KB)
= 1,000 bytes, or
½ page of text
Megabyte (MB)
= 1 million bytes,
or 500 pages
Is a smart phone
all you need?
Let’s not mince
words: A smart
phone—iPhone,
Droid, Palm Pre,
or BlackBerry—
is a computer,
only smaller. Is it
big enough for
you? Consider
your own hardware and software: your body
and brain.
YOUR BODY
How’s your eye-
sight? Your man-
ual dexterity? For
all their ability to
zoom in, smart-
phone screens
measure no more
than 4 inches—
the long way.
Peering into one,
touching tiny but-
tons or icons, and
executing a fin-
icky finger dance
of swipes and
taps could frus-
trate anyone.
YOUR BRAIN
Are you primarily
a communicator,
a consumer, or a
creator? That will
help determine
the right device
for you. A com-
municator could
be content with
“just” a smart
phone. An avid
consumer of
visual media
might crave a
bigger screen
(and, to make
calls with
Apple’s tablet-
size iPad, would
need a voice-
over-Internet
service such as
Skype or Vonage).
But a creator
will need a full-
fledged compu-
ter to display,
manipulate, and
store files.
FIND OU T HOW YOUR
SMART PHONE CAN
PAY FOR I TSELF
AT AARP.ORG/
GETSMART.
PLAY THE NEXT BIG THING
Standing in your living room waving your arms around
used to be a sign your kids were driving you crazy. By
New Year’s it’ll be a family game. Vying to outdo
Nintendo’s upgraded Wii MotionPlus are two
new systems that use digital motion cameras
to track your every maneuver: the Sony
PlayStation Move, which comes with a
handheld wand, and Microsoft’s Kinect,
which doesn’t. Kinect’s camera eye
tracks 48 joints on a player’s body, allow-
ing you to control, say, an on-screen race
car by spinning a nonexistent steering
wheel and pressing an imaginary accelera-
tor with your foot. No gadgetry. Just fun.
Gigabyte (GB)
= 1 billion bytes,
or 500 songs
Terabyte (TB)
= 1 trillion bytes, or
200 high-def films
