Who could have foreseen when the clock ticked over to 1 January 2020 that Zoom, of all tech companies, would see a meteoric rise to success this year? It says less about Zoom as an app and more about their competitors, such as Skype, that despite being seemingly unheard of before this year Zoom has completely exploded in popularity. It’s being used by everyone who isn’t already using Microsoft Teams so it makes sense that the big bosses, sitting around a fancy, newly polished boardroom table, would decide that the next logical step for Zoom would be the development of hardware.
Generation Z
Announced last night, the Zoom For Home – DTEN ME is basically just a really large tablet that’s designed to conduct the smoothest video calls possible. It’s a 27″ screen and features three “smart webcams” and eight noise-reducing microphones. It obviously comes with Zoom pre-installed because it would be pretty stupid for them to develop hardware and not stick their app on it.
From what Zoom has shown off the DTEN ME is designed to be simple to use, with various shortcuts to Zoom’s most used features including video calls, meeting rooms, whiteboards and the contacts you’ve acquired through the platform. It seems the angle Zoom is pushing above all else is the convenience of a device that’s already got all your video conferencing needs built in rather than having to faff around with installs and downloads.
So what’s the price tag on this very large tablet? Well, it’s a pretty steep $599 purchase or, translated into our currency, around R9,945 at the time of writing. That’s a lot of money to pay for what is, essentially, a fancy webcam with a screen. Having said that, we can certainly see the benefits for folks that plan on working from home for the foreseeable future. Perhaps it’s not such a bad investment for Zoom. No word yet on whether or not we’ll be able to grab one locally but we’ll update on that front as soon as we know.
(Source: The Verge)