Information appliance. An information appliance (IA) is an appliance that is designed to easily perform a specific electronic function such as playing music, photography, or editing text.[1][2] Typical examples are smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDAs).
Information appliances partially overlap in definition with, or are sometimes referred to as smart devices, embedded systems, mobile devices or wireless devices. Appliance vs computer[edit] The term information appliance was coined by Jef Raskin around 1979. [3][4] As later explained by Donald Norman in his influential The Invisible Computer,[5] the main characteristics of IA, as opposed to any normal computer, were: