Web Development for Mobile Phones

Introduction

Once, mobile phones were a luxury, today with 5.3 billion (77% of the world’s population) mobile subscribers in the world (as of October 2010) mobile phones are a necessity.  Starting off as huge rugged machines that could only make phone calls and maybe send a text message, today’s mobile devices have internet capabilities, an enormous amount of applications for every imaginable use, high definition displays and cameras, touch screens and ever increasing processing power and memory.

Evolution of Mobile Phones

Here is a detailing the evolution Mobile phones have had throughout the years. 

• Basic Mobile Phones – Rugged and very big and heavy. Only able to call someone and send SMS. Screens only available in Black and White
• Low-end Mobile Devices – Limited memory, no touch support, but some had a very basic camera, and very basic web support. Also some had a music player which could only play 1 format of “music”.
• Mid-end Mobile Devices – same as above but with some HTML-browser support in the web department (although still very incompatible with a lot of websites), better camera and music player, more memory (but still pretty limited), better colours and have some basic games installed.
• High-end Mobile Devices – Higher camera mega pixels, Bluetooth, decent web support, more advanced features, 3G support, much better memory (usage of  micro SD cards etc) and processing power
• Smartphones – full browser and html support.  3G or 4G support, Wi-Fi support, music player, GPS, Bluetooth, touch screens. Again better cameras, memory and processing power.
• Non-phone Devices (Tablets) - Wi-Fi support, browsers and other features (depending on brand)

Mobile Phone Statistics

Here are some statistics on Mobile phones which I found to be quite interesting:

• In 2010 6.5 trillion messages have been sent.
• Apple launched the Appstore in July 2008 with 500 apps, by June 2010 over 225,000 apps were available.
• 10.9 billion apps where downloaded in 2010 (not only from the Apple Appstore)
• Around 160,000 new Andriod smartphones are being sold each day.
• In 2010 6.2billion dollars was spent on apps, and it is estimated that in 2013 almost 30 billion will be spent on apps
• Around 3.3billion dollars will be spent on mobile advertising in 2011
• Users browsing the net with mobile phones are set to top users using PCs in 2013.

Internet Browsing on the Mobile Phone

Since this course is about is called Client/Server Web System Development for a reason. I am going to list the  different types of mobile phone web browsing:

• Focus Navigation - using the arrow keys to scroll the websites and navigate between links.
• Cursor Navigation – Using a mouse cursor, this is moved by using arrow keys
• Touch Navigation – Using the user’s finger or a stylus. The Stylus will be more presice since the tip of the stylus is much smaller.
• Multitouch Navigation – users may select more than one item at the same time.

Geolocation

For this week’s lab session, we made our smart phones and laptops use Geolocation. Geolocation  identifies an object's geographic location, which can be a radar, a computer terminal connected to the Internet or a mobile phone. The mobile phone I’ll be using Geolocation on, is my HTC Wildfire.

Using javascript, the userlocated() function was used as shown below to get the position of the device that run it. The latitude and longitude where found by using position.coords.latitude and position.coords.longitute. These where stored in variables along with a time stamp, which were then printed on the screen when the function was run. If any error occurred while running this function the error message would be displayed.

First I tried to run this on my mobile phone but nothing happened. Then I ran the script on Google Chrome and the message box with “1” as the message was displayed. Then I decided to run the script on Opera and finally the script worked and showed three numbers, the latitude the longitude and the timestamp.

Another more complex example of Geolocation can be found on www.html5demos.com/geo where the location found is shown to you a map. As I ran through the source code to find out how this is done, I discovered that this example used the IP address of the device to find the location, so it was not as accurate as possible.