THE INFOPAD MULTIMEDIA TERMINAL - A PORTABLE DEVICE FOR WIRELESS INFORMATION ACCESS

The architecture of a device that is optimized for wireless informatio n access and display oi multimedia data is substantially different tha n configurations designed for portable stand-alone operation. The requ irements to reduce the weight and energy consumption are the same, but the availability of the wireless link, which is needed for the inform ation access, allows utilization of remote resources. A limiting case is when the only computation that is provided in the portable terminal supports the wireless links or the I/O interfaces, and it is this ext reme position that is explored in the InfoPad terminal design. The arc hitecture of the InfoPad terminal, therefore, can be viewed as essenti ally a switch which connects multimedia data sources in the supporting wired network to appropriate InfoPad output devices (e.g., video disp lay), and connects InfoPad input devices to remote processing (e.g., s peech recognizer server) in the backbone network.