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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.""
Isn't that just another name for XML????
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
What I'm really interested in are things that work globally, not just in one or two countries.
Just like in Japan... they have all these new funky 3G apps, that work no where else but Japan.
When do we get services and apps that truely work worldwide (just like roaming GSM and similar, but on the app level rather than infrastructure?)
**FREE** Track and view your phone's via CellID and/or WIFI and/or GPS
One thing that the last few years have shown is that once platforms are built, it's very hard to predict which ones will take off, and exactly how they were used. I think that the same will be true about mobile data.
You are right to question the true need for such tools. How many of us really need to update our blogs on the bus to work? Of course, an account of a bus ride would be much more interesting than the drivel that you usually see in blogs, but you get my point.
However, I have found one perfect application for my SonyEricsson P800 - it takes the public domain stock prices, and displays them in an easy to read screen. This is much easier than going to a web page, which is going to be full of graphics that I don't want. I don't really need to send emails or surf, but this little app justifies GPRS to me.
I think that there is another question about whether this technology is going to be on the client or the server side. Designers may not be willing to adjust their code for every single device out there, even though I would dearly love to believe that XML can do this for them. On the other hand, if you can make a client side application that will strip out the useless information, or illegible graphics, this will ensure that content is delivered in a useable way. I think the app will have to be device specific: to use a trivial example, the mainstream games that have been ported to mobile devices, like Doom and SimCity, IMHO just don't work, because they were never meant to be used on such small screen real estate. It's very hard to anticipate every single quirk of every single device on the server side, so the work is going to be done on the client side, where the device knows exactly its own requirements.
Unix does not prevent you from doing stupid things; that would also prevent you from doing clever things.
For one thing, a key piece of the industry, the wireless WAN providers, are simply not ready for prime time. It is very difficult to deploy an application over the air, and mostly this is for bureaucratic reasons. Carriers require long expensive certification processes for virtually any application, and often won't talk to you if you're looking at less than 10,000 installed users per app (not per platform or even per installation). Expenses are all out of whack-- bandwidth that isn't being used right now is inordinately expensive; the time to jack up prices is after the technology has proven itself.
The devices themselves leave something to be desired. I'm something of a device iconoclast; experience has taught me that frills sell a device but make it unusable in the field. Battery life, durability and ease of data entry are the three things that make the world go around in my experience. The RIM Blackberry, for example, is black and white, very hard to code against (I haven't played with the Java version yet) has no useful sound and barely usable graphics. It doesn't integrate with anything except Notes and Outlook. It is also my all time favorite. It lasts 2-3 weeks between charges, the text is clearly readable (if unsexy), the keyboard and thumbwheel are extremely usable (not as much with gloves on, but better than the touchscreens), and durable as anything. A coworker once dropped his out of a car, then pulled over and found it by the side of the road. It still was fine.
I'm multifunction device agnostic, too. Architecture groups at major enterprises go crazy for phone/pda combos, but I've found in practice that they do neither well.
OK, so all that aside, what does the world need in the way of PDA's and wireless to get mobile off and running? Glad you asked.