MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

On this last Thursday, February 08th, we had a guest speaker - James Eberhardt, http://www.eberhardt.ca/ - on our Multimedia Pioneering class, talking about the Mobile Technology and its market.

PDAs, Smartphones, Cell phones, MP3 players and other devices are converging to a new concept of applications and bringing a fresh horizon for the Web-solutions environment. Sizes of screen, resolution variation, band, signal and user’s profiles are items that will have to be managed. Today, the mobile market is compounded with all types of devices with different characteristics, showing that the technology does not have a standard. This condition put the mobile developers in a complex situation, because now the solutions have to be made to fit each specific device.

The Mobile technology has some significant services. The SMS stands for Short Message Service, a smart way to send and receive plain text between one cell phone to another, or even between a computer and another mobile device. Also there is the MMS service that stands for Multimedia Message Service; you can add video, music or pictures to your messages. These two services have been extensively used by the end users on the past few years and the numbers are showing an increasing. People are getting used to this technology and the market is finding new possibilities for these services.

Most of the applications done for mobile devices are written in JAVA. We have a lot of games and small applications coming inside our cell phones using JAVA as the standard language, despite the fact that this is not a simple language and requires more time for the development of the applications.

There are other possibilities on the process to create applications for mobile devices, for example there is the FLASH LITE, a small version of flash player which supports Flash 7 and ActionScript 2.0 in the last version, making possible play flash files on cell phones and MP3 players. The problem is that just a few devices come with Flash Lite installed.

The mobile technology is for sure a huge market with a lot of opportunities and space for innovations. Last month we had the iPhone presentation, which was called by Apple as a revolutionary device. For sure we can wait for great changes in the field in the next years. Below some links about mobile technology are presented.

http://www.adobe.com/mobile/
http://www.apple.com/iphone/
http://www.mobilemag.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsnAWzoCez4
http://www.playtxt.net/
http://www.google.ca/sms/howtouse.html
http://www.mytego.com/
http://www.phonesherpa.com/
http://www.mobiledia.com/