These are the commuters who in the place of books now wield portable electronic games, digital assistants and, most of all, the ubiquitous cellular phone, which, both above ground and below, is used continually to send e-mail and surf the Net.
There were certainly other companies vying for a portion of the market when portable electronic games first started appearing in the late seventies, but it was Nintendo – or more specifically legendary industrial designer Gunpei Yokoi – that realised form factor, price, battery life and cuteness were going to be the defining features of a successful product.
First product: a portable electronic-game console.
You'll see people walking around with a portable electronic board game.
The company also publishes books and multimedia titles, offers e-mail services, and sells electronic game systems, computer peripherals (input/output devices), and portable media players.
Greyhound has begun rolling out a streaming entertainment system that allows its passengers to watch movies and television shows, listen to music, surf the Web and play online games with their own Wi-Fi enabled portable electronic devices.
Under Ballmer's leadership, Microsoft diversified its focus through new products such as the electronic game console system Xbox, first released in 2001, and the Zune family of portable media players introduced in 2006.
The electronic textbooks can be downloaded to and read on Kindle, Amazon's portable electronic reader.
But with so many new portable electronic devices to cope with, that could be a challenge.
Portable electronic books are light enough and small enough to be carried easily.
