With built-in mobile connectivity, a device can send and receive as much or as little data as necessary without any explicit action on the owner's part. Often, the number of bits a device needs to send will be so small as to require only the tiniest sliver of bandwidth . Hopefully, such connections will truly be too cheap to meter and will be covered instead by a one-time payment from the device vendor to the cellular operator. Given this scenario, there is no need for users to register or configure anything, which greatly improves usability and creates a much broader set of feasible applications. The mobile Internet may well creep, practically undetected, into people's homes disguised as familiar, immobile appliances.
Hot pots are common, everyday items in Japanese homes.
This hot pot, however, does more. The target market for the i-pot is elderly people whose children or grandchildren might live too far away to monitor them directly. The beauty of the i-pot is that Grandma needn't learn new tricks to use it. As the figure shows, i-pot looks like a regular hotpot. The design protects Grandma from the technology, because she isn't forced to learn a new interface for a familiar object .