Slashdot Mirror
Applications and Service Platforms For Mobile User
Roland Piquepaille writes "ERCIM News is a quarterly publication from the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics. The July 2003 issue is dedicated to research about applications and service platforms for the mobile user. All of the 30 articles are available online. This column details the special constraints applying to the design of these applications: special interfaces, lack of power and memory, and interoperability between heterogeneous networks. In this longer column, you'll find a selection of stories, including links, abstracts and illustrations. Among other projects, you'll discover mBlog, "a mobile information service for all," or Fluid Computing, a middleware which lets "an application 'flow' from one user interface to another.""
A lot of the stuff is already cross compatible. Nokia for instance sells the same games worldwide via its Club Nokia service.
Most other things would need to be localised or at least need local partners to provide the data that these apps need to function.
As for video calls (3G's supposed killer app), I haven't seen any problems yet communicating internationally between 3G networks. For instance, you can make a video call between Australia and the UK and it works just fine (or at least Hutchinson/Orange says it does).
No, it's not just another name for XML. Its a name for the idea/vision that your application state can be migrated to (an)other device(s) at any point in time and even remain synchronized! I.e. you can not only migrate that document onto your PDA and then continue working on it during the bus-ride and later on your home PC (and back again next morning), but you could even share a document with other users at any point in time and changes by them could automatically be reflected in your copy.
The name tries to visualize that transferring/sharing an application's state should be as easy as pouring a glass of water into another vessel.
We were cought a bit by surprise by this early publication, so we don't have anything downloadable, yet. But we are working on it and there should be something available in a few weeks or so.