Information appliance

[1][2] Typical examples are smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDAs).

Jef Raskin initially tried to include such features in the Apple Macintosh, which he designed, but eventually the project went a quite different way.

For a short while during the mid- and late 1980s, there were a few models of simple electronic typewriters with screens and some form of memory storage.

These dedicated word processor machines had some of the attributes of an information appliance, and Raskin designed one of them, the Canon Cat.

He described some properties of his definition of information appliance in his book The Humane Interface.