Mobile Phones
Mobile data networks such as GPRS make available a wide variety of applications and data services for the ubiquitous mobile phone.
Up to the year 2000 a mobile phone was purely a voice capable device with SMS text messaging capability. In order to promote the concept of mobile Internet access a micro browser was developed for the mobile phone to access Internet services delivered using what was termed the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP).
The first implementations of WAP received a particularly bad press due to the limitations of the mobile phone browser and the lack of Internet content tailored for WAP.
Mobile phone handsets continued to develop however with enhancements such as colour screens and with GPRS built in as standard. More significantly however the phones became capable of running local applications with widely available development tools for building these applications. The phones effectively became mini-computers.
This lead to a number of highly successful application areas in the consumer market such as ringtones and logos. Also the advent of camera phones and an extension on SMS to allow transmission of pictures known as MMS (Multimedia Messaging Services) promoted the mobile phone as a high technology platform capable of performing many tasks and applications.
Mobile Internet Applications
Despite the poor early take up of WAP almost all phones continued to ship with WAP browsers. The WAP standard continued to be enhanced and has now been replaced with xHTML a more powerful platform for browser based applications and content.
Mobile phones screens have also got bigger and colour screens now ship as standard.
This means that the mobile Internet browser is now a viable platform for mobile applications.
The advantages of the mobile Internet from an application point of view is that no applications have to be installed on the phone. The application and data are accessed simply through the browser on the mobile phone. This means it is secure and there are no application distribution issues. Therefore an application can be developed and made available to a wide community of users across a mix of mobile phone types.
The drawback however is that the mobile phone and browser must be connected to the network. It will not work if there is no network coverage. Also, the speed of the application is dependent on the speed of the wireless connection for all operations.
This may result in an end user experience which is not ideal.
Applications running on the Mobile Phone
Mobile phones are now reasonably sophisticated computers with the ability to run an application and hold local data for use by the application. To take advantage of this a number of specific operating systems for phones have appeared over the last few years. These operating systems provide an application development and run time platform designed to cope with the constraints of the mobile phone environment ie. Small screen sizes, limited memory and wireless communication. The main application developments today are as follows:-
Symbian
The Symbian development environment was spawned from the earlier Psion handheld computer. It was popularised through early adoption by Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola. Subsequent licensees of the technology include Siemens, Sharp and Panasonic.
The major proponent of Symbian technology is Nokia with their Series 60 and 80 mobile phones.
An early example of a Symbian phone from Sony-Ericsson is the P900 shown
See www.symbian.com
Java
Sun have been promoting the multi-device java application platform for over 10 years now. This was initially popular on desktop and server computers and was then migrated to the mobile phone environment. Java on mobile phones is described and known as J2ME. (Java 2 Midlet edition).
Java is by far the most popular application development on mobile phones. Over 100 million phones are now in the market with J2ME capabilities and it ships with all new phones. The most common form of J2ME applications are games.
Windows
Microsoft has been the dominant force on the PC desktop for over a decade now. They have also become the dominant player in PC Server systems. The move to mobile devices was therefore a natural progression for them. With Microsoft Windows Mobile they offer an application development platform which spans a range of device types. This includes mobile phones, Pocket PC, and custom built handheld devices which run a variant of windows mobile called Window CE.
Microsoft is still a minority player in the mobile phone arena. An example of a mobile phone using the Microsoft platform is the orange SPV:-
Microsoft’s strength however lies in its integration capabilities with business systems. For the last few years Microsoft has been promoting a new application and development infrastructure called .NET. This is aimed at simplifying application development and integration across different systems. .NET will be discussed further in the Pocket PC and Application Development sections.
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