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There are plenty of considerations that you can make when picking interactive displays for business collaboration, but how to choose the best solutions for the meeting room from various brands?
Currently, unresponsive technology and a lack of real interaction and collaboration mean that many management figures in office spaces are losing out on potential staff insights. At the same time, other business structures miss the chance to gain a consensus over important internal decisions.
One way to make the most of your meeting room potential is to implement interactive display technology capable of bringing a fully collaborative, interactive experience for all participants in the company. The key benefit is encouraging the sharing of ideas and higher levels of comprehension among colleagues.
In this post, we&#;ll look more in-depth at how your business can supercharge its collaboration by using interactive displays for business settings, conference rooms, or even huddle rooms.
Interactive flat panel displays take the form of large multi-touch screens embedded with an operating system, including its OS, which means that the interactive flat panel displays can act as its collaborative meeting platform &#; without needing external administrative preparation, not just a traditional multi-touch display.
Interactive flat panel displays are intuitive enough to host entire meetings, huddle room meetings, video conferencing, training courses, or collaboration sessions in a way that involves all participants.
While some companies still rely on projections and whiteboards, interactive flat panel displays can show participants details, charts, and multimedia in full, rich, 4K clarity. Built-in apps and cross-platform functionality mean that managers or meeting holders can confidently orchestrate their content, and participants can contribute to the information on the show remotely.
It&#;s fair to say that business collaboration techniques have already come a long way in the 21st century, and interactive flat panel displays represent a significant next step in adding a truly interactive element to the office meeting room.
In addition to the interactive flat panel display price, there are plenty of considerations that you can compare and review when picking the ideal solutions from various interactive displays for business scenarios. Let&#;s review from the hardware side:
One of the most significant things to consider is the type of hardware you want to use in your interactive displays for business.
Resolution can play a vital part in the experience your meeting room offers employers and employees.
While smaller-scale huddle rooms can use p FHD displays, larger meeting rooms, board rooms, and fully immersive suites benefit from a 4K/UHD ( x pixel) resolution.
Because the quality of interaction is paramount to our displays, AG Neovo uses a 4K resolution for Meetboard 3 interactive displays for business.
Naturally, size matters too.
When deciding on the size of an interactive flat panel display to suit your business needs, take a moment to consider the size of the meeting room. It&#;s also worth thinking of the size of the potential audience you&#;ll have for your interactive screen.
There&#;s no specific rule when choosing a display screen size that fills the meeting room. Typically, 65&#; is fine for small-to-medium sized spaces or huddle spaces (less than 5 persons), while 75&#; is suitable for a medium-sized meeting room (5~10 persons), and 86&#; is perfect for a board room area and beyond (more than 10 persons). AG Neovo provides 65&#;, 75&#;, and 86&#; to meet any of your meeting rooms&#; requirements.
As a meeting platform, connectivity is another vital facet of a high-performance interactive display.
An interactive display can allow all meeting participants to wirelessly connect via their own notebooks and smartphones, video conferencing equipment, or other internet-enabled devices &#; helping to make an impression on clients and board members alike.
HDMI, VGA or DisplayPort signal inputs allow you to connect to external PC and laptops if any meeting participants or guests would like to use their laptops for presentation purposes.
This enables you to connect to an optional Windows-based PC/OPS module, and turns your interactive display into a powerful PC.
These connectivities allow you to connect Meetboard with external devices, like a storage hard drive, to share or save your files from a USB drive. You can also easily connect a webcam, wireless dongle, or video conferencing devices to Meetboard quickly and easily through a single USB-C cable, and wirelessly mirror and touch the screen while charging your devices.
The interactive flat panel display allows participants to access the Internet whether they use Ethernet or an included Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Module.
Touch functionality is a key feature of interactive whiteboards. It allows participants to write, annotate and operate the platform using either their fingers or a stylus and enables multiple users to draw on the display for group discussion.
But there are some considerations you need to make when it comes to touch functions. Most interactive flat panel displays support 20 touch-points &#; but this is only from a hardware perspective. This means that although your display has a higher capacity for points, the operating system might limit the flat panel to just 10 touch-points. However, the limited points are still considered fine for multiple users to write or draw.
If you want to use Windows OS, this operating system will allow as many as 20 touch-points. Though, if you want to use your macOS laptop, you will need to download a driver and install Mac gestures to the display.
Thinking about the meeting scenario, group discussion for idea collaboration will be very important, Meetboard 3 interactive display for business bundles in two double-headed stylus pens capable of being operated simultaneously with two different writing colors.
Schedule a demo to learn more about Meetboard 3.
When considering your hardware, it&#;s essential to take the time to weigh up whether your interactive whiteboard is integrated with any onboard operating systems or your display acts only as a large multi-touch screen. Today, many competent interactive displays embed Android OS, allowing you to start meetings in an instant.
AG Neovo Meetboard 3 offers an all-in-one design in this respect, allowing users to tap into its built-in Android OS. You can immediately turn on the interactive display and go for your meeting without connecting to any external PC system.
This design is particularly vital when you&#;re having a huddle meeting, an urgent meeting, or some participants bring a laptop for a meeting.
Usability is one of the biggest concerns among adopters of interactive display technology. Investing in advanced collaborative hardware is a significant show of ambition and adaptability, but it won&#;t amount to much if managers cannot use the screen.
For meeting purposes, time efficiency and productivity are the key consideration for hosting a meeting. The user interface or any function design should be easy to understand and easy to use, letting all meeting participants engage in the meeting without wasting time on the display operation.
Meetboard interactive displays for business have intuitive user interfaces with easy-to-use toolsSome high-performance and relatively low-cost displays habitually under-investing in the user interface or utilize a complicated UI which can lead to confusion among users.
AG Neovo Meetboard 3 interactive displays for business collaboration feature a simplified and aesthetic Android UI that springs into action as soon as the home screen launches. There are merely the initial options of choosing a file for your presentation, mirroring mobile devices, launching an application, or initiating annotation functions.
The best of Meetboard 3 home screen is that the assistive menu on the two sides of the screen is customizable. You can easily drag and drop up to 4 preferred apps and tools on the side toolbars.
Furthermore, Meetboard 3 provides annotation for the best experience. By utilizing an intuitive annotation toolbar capable of offering useful functions with less learning curve when users interact with the flat panel display in real-time.
The first way is the instant annotation tool. This allows you to annotate different file formats, including images, videos, apps, etc. You can choose different colors and brush thicknesses to visualize your idea right on the screen.
The other way is a built-in whiteboard app with more collaborative functions. Meetboard Whiteboard App provides a user-friendly canvas to import any images, office files, or web pages, and you and your teams can annotate together.
You can choose a wide variety of colors, and brush thicknesses, and also insert tables, and sticky notes to assist in your brainstorming process.
The Meetboard whiteboard app also amazes you with a custom toolbar setting where you can select favorite and frequently used tools displayed on the toolbar.
Again, it&#;s worth taking some time to explore your needs when picking the right interface for your meeting room. This decision is significant if you&#;re not the most confident user of collaborative technology.
Meetboard Whiteboard App has custom toolbars settingsWidget tools are often used on your smartphones, and with AG Neovo Meetboard 3, you can easily place widgets on the home screen to show important information and quickly access frequently visited web pages.
Meetboard interactive displays for business meetings provide the Widget SettingsOf course, the aim of the game is collaboration.
But what form of collaboration suits your business needs the most? Are you primarily looking to mirror your displays? Or are you aiming to support and annotate a series of different files in front of dozens of employees?
Also, when you are finishing your meeting, how will you share meeting minutes or how to save your brainstorming ideas or consensus for the follow-up?
Here, you must be aware of just what you&#;re buying.
BYOD has been the trend for businesses. Working on tablets and mobile phones have become common behavior today, while 67% of employees use personal devices at work. It&#;s better to consider the mirroring capabilities of your interactive flat panel display.
Also, how easy would it be to offer collaboration in your meetings from these mobile devices while checking whether there&#;s any mirroring application integrated within your flat panel and how it works?
There are several ways to do a wireless presentation or screen mirroring, like using the wireless dongle or installing the software. But is there any new way to mirror your devices to the big screen?
Meetboard 3 supports AirPlay, Miracast, and Chromecast screen mirroring. If you want to instantly share images from iPhone/ iPad/ MacBook or Android phones, Airplay and Miracast help you to wirelessly present multimedia content with ease.
Using a notebook and Google Documents for the presentation, you can use the &#;cast&#; function from the Chrome browser. You or your guests invited to the meeting do not need to install any software to do the wireless presentation. And you don&#;t need to pass an external wireless dongle to the next presenter.
Meetboard 3 also integrates Bytello Share App, enabling an easy-to-connect gateway to your meeting participants&#; mobile devices. The display can show up to 9 devices mirrored on the screen simultaneously. The participants can draw or write on their mobile devices and mirror their contents to Meetboard 3.
While it&#;s not considered essential to some, given the role that mobile devices play in bringing interconnectivity to meeting spaces, it&#;s worth looking at whether your interactive display developer has a dedicated mobile app for added connectivity.
Video conferencing is one of the key efficient ways to communicate with remote staff or clients. To set up a video conferencing platform on the interactive display, you need to think about whether the display can be compatible with the all-in-one camera and video conferencing software.
Connecting the camera to the display is easy. One USB port can help to solve this hardware installation.
Now, a few brands are launching interactive displays with a built-in camera as an all-in-one concept. It solves the installation effort and is driver-free. But, the built-in camera specification may not be excellent as dedicated video conferencing brands.
Software is also a key element. There are several popular video conferencing software or app in the market, like Zoom, GoToMeeting, Teams, Skype etc. It is impossible to host or join video conferencing without the software. So, before choosing an interactive whiteboard to be your video conferencing platform, you need to check whether the display provides a built-in video conferencing app or offers a flexible way to install the software.
For example, Meetboard 3 is ready to support most of the current all-in-one video conferencing cameras, like Logitech Meetup. Once the camera is connected to Meetboard via a USB cable, the camera will be automatically activated. With the Android-based open-source platform, Meetboard 3 supports you to download your preferred video conferencing app&#;s APK file from the provider&#;s official website and install it back on Meetboard 3.
Because many interactive whiteboards are integrated with an Android-based OS, it&#;s important to make sure they also support Microsoft Office file formats, like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF &#; as these files are very commonly used by businesses. Meetboard 3 comes preloaded with WPS Office, an application that supports both Office and PDF files.
Meeboard interactive displays for business meetings support multiple file formatsCloud connectivity is another collaborative tool that&#;s being viewed with increasing importance, as most of us save and share documents via Cloud Drives.
Meetboard 3 provides the cloud drive shortcut so that you can wirelessly access, share and save files and folders that connect to your Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive.
Some older devices may be unable to offer satisfactory cloud-based connections, meaning the prospect of more unnecessary wires. Connections to Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive should be considered essential to businesses nowadays.
Cloud Drive portals are offered by interactive displays for business scenariosAG Neovo constantly looks at fresh ways to ensure that your approach to collaboration is as seamless as possible, and the Meetboard 3 supports QR Code scanning to provide fresh avenues for mobile devices to download files with ease.
You&#;ll no longer need to use your mobile to take a picture to save your meeting files and spend time using a document application to adjust to the images. QR Code scan and save can download exact files as you see them on Meetboard 3.
Sharing by is a unique feature within the Meetboard Whiteboard App based on considering different meeting scenarios occurring all the time, like Internet/Wi-Fi connection problems, privacy and security issues, etc.
While many displays can share annotated contents by saving files to a connected USB or cloud drive, AG Neovo&#;s Meetboard does the extra step. One of the biggest problems in meeting room scenarios is USB connectivity, with access to storage devices prohibited due to security issues and virus concerns.
So, how can you save files and take them with you?
There&#;s also the issue of privacy. Why should anyone log in to their Google account to access files while in a meeting room? If you forget to log out after you save your files, you might expose your account information or every file in your cloud drive.
Additionally, in some scenarios, Wi-Fi is restricted in the meeting room or the entire company. How can you share or mirror your presentations or files from your mobile devices to the interactive display? Or even use a QR Code scan and save as AG Neovo offers?
If you are looking for more details, kindly visit all in one interactive flat panel.
You can directly compose emails from the Meetboard Whiteboard App and send the files without using an external PC. Before the meeting, you can send files to the Meetboard account, so you don&#;t need to bring a laptop. When the meeting finishes, you can also send out the meeting minutes, just like you send out an the way you do every working day.
The most important advantage of the function that differs from various sharing functions is the efficiency of bringing all your attendants in line with the meeting conclusion, unlike saving files into a USB drive, or cloud drive, where individuals save the files.
In this case, the files would still need to be sent to others again from whoever saves them, queuing to save files to USB drives or cloud drives one by one or asking whoever saves the files from emailing them later.
Once you capture your team&#;s ideas, you can instantly compose an that can be sent to all participants at once &#; keeping your teams in line with the meeting consensus for follow-up.
AG Neovo New Meetboard 3 - 4K Interactive Displays for Hybrid Learning & Meeting Solutions
The most important consideration is your audience. Interactive displays for business can suit different meeting rooms, but the overall goal should be to create a system that keeps employees, clients, and board members engaged. If your teams typically consist of around a few members, it could be best to save money and buy a 65&#; screen.
If a meeting room typically squeezes in over 10 personnel, it could make more sense to invest in a larger flat panel display to keep everyone engaged.
65&#;, 75&#;, and 86&#; model sizes offered by interactive displays for business scenariosCaters to your strengths and those of prospective users. In certain industries or traditional companies, managers may be unaware of more modern collaborative practices. In this case, spend more time looking for user-friendly models than those brimming with complex features. Be sure to look out for user reviews, which will often cover ease of use.
When exploring your interactive whiteboard options, take some time to look at the types of presentation files your business uses. Compatibility is an often overlooked part of the buying process for collaboration tools but can save users plenty of hours in getting up to speed with things.
Accessibility is also critical for meeting attendees. You must quickly access and transfer meeting files between your local PC and the interactive whiteboard.
Meetboard 3 allows you to easily access, share and transfer your files via USB Drives, Cloud Drives, and even an advanced setting with Samba and FTP services, ensuring the highest data security while you access files with other local users.
USB, Cloud Drives, Samba and FTP service can be accessed on Meetboard interactive displays for business meetingsWe live in an interconnected world. So much so that lots of business is conducted on mobile devices today. Consider the mirroring capabilities of the displays you wish to buy.
Bytello Share App on Meetboard 3 offers the possibility of simultaneous mirroring from 9 devices at any time.
How will you share your information post-presentation? It can be troubling and time-consuming to presentations to all participants following a meeting. But AG Neovo features a unique asset in that its built-in function can easily send fully detailed, annotated swathes of data to all users.
This particular factor could be vital if you intend to bring convenience to meeting minutes&#; distribution.
Meetboard interactive displays for business has a built-in functionWorking remotely poses many difficulties to business owners. That&#;s especially true when you&#;re navigating teams that require much collaboration to accomplish the tasks at hand.
Luckily, working remotely is being transformed with the interactive display. Meetboard 3 brings you a video conference ready, that lets your employees and teams connect no matter where in the nation they are.
If you&#;re looking for a video conference collaboration tool that helps your business succeed as a remote team, you&#;re in the right place.
A female is annotating on Metboard interactive displays for business collaborationInteractive whiteboards are a giant evolutionary leap for company collaboration practices. They enable a meeting and conference room engagement level that&#;s never been possible, with high-quality multimedia content and interactive features that can be digested and edited in real-time.
The technology may appear complex at times, but with the right operating system, wireless screen mirroring, and USB-C connectivity, many interactive displays can be easily operated, and a relatively small learning curve for managers and employers alike.
AG Neovo has looked to prioritize ease of use alongside comprehensive business collaboration technology within Meetboard 3. Dual-stylus annotations and multi-device compatibility are intertwined in an Android-based operating system designed to be instantly recognizable and understandable to users.
With the added option of a range of sharing functions, AG Neovo Meetboard 3 interactive displays for business meetings helps you and your team stay on the same track and provide your business to collaborate in confidence long into the future.
Interested in getting more information? Request a demo today!
To the inexperienced, a TV and a touch overlay would seem to present a school with an inexpensive option for an Interactive Flat Panel, but this really doesn&#;t work.
An overlay is a second piece of technology that lays on the screen of a regular TV or monitor to create a touch screen. The problem with this technology is that while it may be cheaper than a fully integrated unit &#; by integrated we mean that the touch component as well as the screen are all in one &#; the experience that you get as a user is not good.
First, there is a problem with accuracy due to something called a large parallax. A parallax refers to the amount of space there is between your finger or pen pointing at the screen and where the cursor is displayed on the screen. With the larger parallax you get when using an overlay, this causes problems when you try to do things that require great accuracy &#; manipulating an Excel sheet for example. It&#;s hard to have accuracy with an overlay.
Think of how many times on NBC&#;s Monday Night Football[1] you see the presenters touching the same player two or three times to try and move him around. This is because of the large parallax on their screen.
Second, the overlays never seem to actually fit the screen properly. This causes problems as the screen and overlay get out of sync. You need to recalibrate often to regain the accuracy &#; rather like with the Interactive Whiteboards you are looking to replace!
Infra-Red and Surface Light Wave Technology are two of the most common touch technologies found on Interactive Flat Panels today.
The way they work is by casting an invisible grid across the surface of the panel. When you touch the screen, you break the infra-red line of sight across the X and the Y axis creating a coordinate. The computer converts this coordinate into a mouse position. This is how you control the computer from the screen.
Infra-Red is also good for multi-touch input as it accurately tracks the multiple mouse positions. The technology is incredibly fast and accurate and it is not humanly possible to move your finger quicker than the technology can track. This technology is not pressure sensitive so you don&#;t need to press hard on the surface.
PCAP or Projected Capacitive technology is a totally flat &#;iPad[2] like&#; surface. This is very much the future of the Interactive Flat Panel as the technology is very responsive and the flat surface provides a fantastic user experience when using the touch screen. The problem is that the technology is really just now being used for larger screens so is very expensive. You are looking at somewhere between one and half to twice the cost of the same sized infra-red touch unit. This will put PCAP out of range of most education budgets at this time.
Others
There are a number of other technologies out there. Five and Seven wire resistive technology as well as Surface Acoustic Waves (SAW). These technologies are really not suited to the large screen and are much more accustomed for smaller monitors of 24&#; or below.
They are also not great for touch-based annotation (with a finger or pen) and are more commonly found on Point of Sale (POS) machines where you are simply registering clicks on an unchanging screen &#; such as you would find at the checkout of a grocery store or in a restaurant.
Commercial Grade LED over Consumer Grade LED &#; What&#;s the difference?
When selecting your Interactive Flat Panel, you do need to make sure that you are buying a Commercial Grade Panel. There are two types of physical LED panels on the market (this is the bit that creates the image on the screen), Commercial and Consumer. The difference between the two really boils down to where and how often it&#;s being used?
For example, when you buy a TV for your house, it is not going to be running seven days a week, 24 hours a day &#; unless you have a serious Netflix[3] addiction. If you did run your TV this often, you would definitely invalidate your warranty. TV manufacturers actually expect that the TV gets to have a rest for several hours a day and is only used for a few hours of continuous use. Usage expectations are different for a Commercial grade product.
A Commercial Grade LED is designed and rated to be used for much longer periods of time. Some manufacturers such as TouchIT Technologies actually rate their product for continuous 24/7 usage[4]. When the Interactive Flat Panel is going to be on for extended periods of time during the school day, this is important.
With a commercial grade LED you also get a Commercial Grade Warranty. This for example is an on-site warranty where if something goes wrong with the LED, the manufacturer sends out a technician to your school and they fix the product there at your location. This is very different from the warranty that comes from the average retail store. We do cover warranties and the different types of warranty later in the eBook.
Choosing a brand of Interactive Flat Panel is not a decision that you should take lightly. When looking at brands pay attention to the total package that the manufacturer is offering. Quite often when you are comparing brands you&#;re not comparing &#;apples with apples.&#;
Also, what I find particularly interesting about this, is that the market has really been dominated by non-household names and only of late have the likes of Microsoft[5] and Google[6] entered the market ̶ albeit with incredibly expensive products!
What you do need to remember is that there are a limited number of physical LED panel manufacturers in the world; so the underlying display technologies for many of the manufacturers of Interactive Flat Panels is actually the same. This is why you need to be looking at the overall package. Here&#;s my question check list for comparing manufacturers.
You should be looking for at a bare minimum MAC[7], Windows[8], Chrome[9] OS
Software offerings vary dramatically. You should at least get some form of annotation software but you should be looking for more than this. What education content do they have available? Do they have any free resources you can download? What tools do they have for the classroom?
This is a big question as we&#;ve seen a couple of manufacturers change their pricing policy to an annual subscription model. This means you will continue to pay year after year and this also means you will need to find that money from somewhere or risk losing the software.
Depending on your strategy for hardware in the classroom, you may wish to look for their support of BYOD and collaboration. The BYOD or Bring Your Own Device initiative encourages users to bring their own tablet or laptop to interact with the Interactive Flat Panel.
Look for support for MAC, Windows, tablets, both Android and IOS, and be certain to ask about Chrome OS. Chromebooks, due to their lower price tag, are becoming increasingly popular in the classroom. Unfortunately, due to the Chromebook&#;s lower quality and lower processing capabilities, they prove a challenge for some manufacturers to support.
You should be looking for onsite servicing for a minimum of 3 years for total peace of mind.
This is key and we have a section in this eBook dedicated to training.
Budget? What budget&#;.. of course price is the biggest driving factor for any tech decision a school or school district makes.
It&#;s only when you analyze and compare all of the above that you get a good idea of the overall value of the package. Our experience is that smaller, specialist companies who are focused 100% on the Interactive Flat Panel, offer the best overall packages when compared against some of the more well-known household name brands.
When beginning to shop for LED touchscreens, we decided to look at as many as possible before making a decision. Over the course of the summer we brought in or saw demoed at least 6 or 7 different models and manufacturers. We tried to take in various different factors such as hardware and software factors. Also important were items like sales and technical support as well as installation issues.
&#; Andy Godfrey Hampton Bay School District, NY
I&#;m not quite sure who coined the phrase &#;bigger is better,&#; but when talking about Interactive Flat Panels this is definitely the case. What usually dictates this though is budget and what you have available to spend. Ultimately, I am sure it will come down to budgets that dictate the size of the Interactive Flat Panel that you purchase, but here are a couple of considerations to think about outside of the monetary cost.
In our experience, the 78&#; Interactive Whiteboards that have been in your classrooms for the last 5 years are typically getting replaced with 55&#; and 65&#; Interactive Flat Panels. While you are sacrificing physical inches, you are gaining a lot of what I call real estate on the screen.
To explain this further, most of the projectors that were being used with Interactive Whiteboards were x 768 resolution. The Interactive Flat Panels at a minimum are x resolution, so you are getting almost twice the page width in terms of pixels. If you opt for a 4K Flat Panel (I&#;ll cover this later) you are actually getting four times the resolution and four times the number of pixels than your Interactive Whiteboard had.
Keep in mind that the image is a lot brighter than a projector. It has a much higher contrast ratio too, which means it is easier to see the smaller Interactive Flat Panel from the back of the classroom than it was the Interactive Whiteboard.
When selecting a size of Interactive Flat Panel, you have to be mindful about teachers and students being able to reach the top of the screen. The bottom of the Interactive Flat Panel is normally at a minimum around 36&#; (90cm) from the floor. When you consider the physical size of the 85&#; for example, if you have it any lower than this then the students will not be able to see the unit, but any higher and the teacher will not be able to reach the top of the unit. I think this is another reason that the 65&#; has been so popular.
10pt, 15pt, 20pt, 32pt &#; how much multi-touch do I actually need?
In our humble opinion, once the market progressed to two point multi-touch, that was enough for most users and the rest is just &#;marketing hype&#;. Having 15pt over 10pt touch in my opinion does not make it a better IFP. With just two point touch you could have two students at the IPF at any one time. You could use gestures like pinch to zoom and twist to rotate. There are few advantages of having 20pt touch over 10pt touch for example. The multi-touch experience is very much driven by the software. If you are using software that can make use of the multi-touch to its advantage then there is of course a reason for opting for more touch points. We tend to find that outside of educational games, there is no real need for lots of touch points. After all, there is really only enough space for three students to stand side by side and write together even on an 100&#; IFP! One thing to remember is that just because you have a multi-touch screen, it doesn&#;t make all software multi-touch. The software has to be designed to be &#;multi-touch friendly&#; so if you are using third party software at the moment, it might be worth checking if you will get any additional benefits with the multi-touch screen.
If you are looking for Multi-Zone Gameification for your Interactive Flat Panel, then you should really consider Contribute Cloud Software which comes as standard for TouchIT Interactive LEDs.
To Integrate a PC or not To Integrate a PC ? &#; that is the question&#;
The ability to have an integrated PC on your IFP in the most part is an aesthetic choice over a practical one. An integrated PC normally means that the PC is nicely located on the rear of the unit, out of sight so that when the IFP is mounted to a wall you have no cables showing and there is no need for a shelf and an external computer. In practical terms, most teachers (or classrooms) have their own computer so unless the integrated PC is going to replace one of these or upgrade it, there is no real need. That said, on the other side of the coin integrated PCs are more secure than having laptops left in the classroom if security is an issue.
We are seeing a slight shift in the technology in the market regarding integrated PCs and many IFP manufacturers are moving away from their own custom built IPCs. They were often more costly than a regular computer and now, we see the manufacturers are moving towards what is known as OPS technology. OPS stands for Open Pluggable System and this is a technology or rather a protocol designed by Intel for a small form factor PC. What the PC does is it slots not the IFP. Because the protocol or connection is general, any IFP with an OPS slot can connect any OPS PC. So that means the schools could purchase one manufacturer&#;s IFPs and then source their own OPS PCs from a different vendor or indeed at a different specification to what was being offered. As long as it was certified as an OPS then it would fit the IFP. This is also great for IT Staff managing the deployment. If an OPS goes down, unplug it, slot a new one in and off you go, providing you have imaged it with an Operating System of course!
Do I need onboard Android?
In , 100% you do!
What is onboard Android?
Onboard Android means that there is a built in Android Operating System on the IFP. This means that when you switch the IFP on without having any computer connected to it, you will be able to browse the web, run an annotation program and other Apps that are available for the Android OS.
The real advantage here is that there is no need for a computer to be connected to the screen. For sure this is not a replacement for having a Windows, MAC or Chrome OS machine connected to the screen as you can do so much more with them. But if you are just looking to visit a website or do some quick annotation, the onboard Android OS is great for this.
Considerations
What you must ask yourself is &#;how am I going to use the Android OS&#;? You may think that this is an easy question and that you have a Samsung Galaxy Tablet or and the IFP is just a larger version of that. Unfortunately, this is not quite the case with all Interactive Flat Panels. You need to look at new IFPDs like the TouchIT Rapide with super-fast Android 8.0 which is computer-replacing technology. Older, Android 5.1 systems do not cut it.
Most IFPs that have onboard Android OS do not have access to the Google Play Store. The reason for this is that the Google License is incredibly expensive which if you are selling a few hundred thousand tablets it is worth the investment. For the IFP manufacturer, it is simply too costly. Therefore, you must check what the particular manufacturer is offering in terms of Apps.
Does the manufacturer have their own annotation App? We all know that Paint for example is no use as an annotation and note taking tool. Therefore if the Android OS is going to be useful, then the manufacturer should have their own annotation App.
Also, say you do have access to the Google Play Store for example, just because you can download and App, doesn&#;t mean that it is going to run well on the IFP. Resolutions are much different to Tablets and Cell Phones so the Apps themselves have to be able to cope with the change in resolution &#; many cant. With the millions of Apps that are available on Google Play, how can you ensure that only Applications that are suitable for your students are downloaded &#; very difficult to police. Also, whose Google account are you going to use to download the content from the Google Play Store? Whose credit card details are you going to add for paid content? All things that in a school environment are particularly difficult to put in place.
To give you any example of what TouchIT Technologies does, we have our own App Store launched in that is linked to our IFPs to give you access to Apps that are suitable and tested on our range. All the Apps in our store are free as in a school, whose account are you going to connect to download a paid app &#; its simple, you&#;re simple not going to do it! In this way we will be able to offer tested, relevant, content safe Apps for our customers to download and use on their TouchIT IFP.
Without access to a store, the onboard Android will have very little value.
This short guide is an extract from the eBook &#;Bring Back My Whiteboard!&#; &#; Written by TouchIT Technologies CEO Andi Brabin. Enter your address below to receive your free copy.
If you want to learn more, please visit our website smart board 86 inch price.