Handheld pixels

The mobile phone industry has experienced an explosive growth in recent years. Mobile phone subscriber numbers have passed the 1.6 billion mark at the end of 2004. The emerging markets such as China, India, and Brazil contribute this growth. In China, the number of mobile subscribers has already surpassed the number of fixed landline phone subscribers. In Korea, the number of mobile phone Internet subscribers is 34.53 million people or 72% of the population in June 2004 (APEC, 2005). Mobile e-commerce (m-commerce) makes business mobility a reality. Mobile users can access the Internet at anytime and anywhere with ubiquitous, inexpensive computing infrastructure. Mobile wireless services are ranging from mobile phone networks to wireless local area networks. The service provided by mobile phone systems has achieved huge success. Mobile phone users originate from all walks of life and include almost all age groups—from teenagers to retired people. It creates a new method of personal communication without location constraints. As telecommunication technologies are converging at fast speed. We will study mobile phone and personal digital assistant (PDA) related to mobile and wireless telecommunication. Hence, m-commerce is defined as electronic commerce carried out in handheld devices such as mobile phone and PDA through mobile and wireless telecommunication networks.

Wireless technologies such as Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi), handheld devices are communicating more frequently with conventional computers in offices, meeting rooms, classrooms, and homes. The smart homes of the future will have ubiquitous embedded computation, and an increasing number of appliances can already communicate wirelessly. The authors launched the Pebbles project to determine whether a handheld device, such as a personal digital assistant (PDA) or cell phone, could serve as a simpler, more effective remote control. Office-centered applications include using the PDA instead of a laser pointer, using a PDA to remotely control a PowerPoint presentation, and using a PDA with the nondominant hand to scroll windows on a PC. In the home, we are exploring how to use the PDA as a customizable, intelligent personal universal controller (PUC) for appliances, creating high-quality control panels on the handheld using a high-level specification of the appliance's capabilities. We are also interested in how PDAs can assist in providing both appliance and computer access for the disabled, including the development of new text entry methods for the motor-impaired user.

Lessons not learned on data disposal

Even in the POST-PC era, the need for 3D graphics has steadily increased. In the design of the 3D graphics accelerator for mobile devices, the physical limitation such as power, size and input device must be considered. Moreover, the 3D graphics accelerator should reside in a single chip (SoC) with other blocks such as CPU, audio, video decoder and peripheral blocks. This work describes the design and implementation of mobile 3D graphics accelerator platform. We propose a mobile 3D graphics accelerator platform that has good performance and small size, and supports standard 3D graphics API (application programming interface). Proposed 3D graphics accelerator platform supports hardware Goraud shading, texture mapping, back & front face culling, Z buffering and alpha blending. This platform was verified on a FPGA test board with standard 3D API. It is suitable for cost effective mobile 3D platform such as smart phone, PDA (personal digital assistant), and other mobile devices.

If you had cast the doubts about the safety of mobile phones to the back of your mind, then think again. Hand-held personal data assistants (PDAs) are about to bring these concerns firmly to the front. The way we use PDAs – holding them in front of our heads as opposed to against our ears – presents new challenges concerning the potential health risks of mobile devices. Now a team of electronic engineers in the UK has found that metal-rimmed glasses can significantly change how much radiation from handheld devices is absorbed by the head, particularly the eyes and nose.

This paper proposes effective 3D graphics hardware. It is designed to support the OpenGL ES 2.0 and Shader model 3.0. We develop all module (vertex shader, clipping engine, triangle setup engine, rasterizer, pixel shader and raster operator) of 3D pipeline on FPGA using RTL design. The proposed hardware of which total gate count is about 1.486M operates with 100Mpixels/sec at pixel shader. Compared to the other product of a company, the proposed architecture result in about 50% improvement in term of cycle.

BackgroundThe commercial development and expansion of mobile phone networks has led to the creation of devices combining mobile phones and personal digital assistants, which could prove invaluable in a clinical setting. This pilot study aimed to look at how one such device compared with the current pager system in facilitating inter-professional communication in a hospital clinical team.MethodsThe study looked at a heterogeneous team of doctors (n = 9) working in a busy surgical setting at St. Mary's Hospital in London and compared the use of a personal digital assistant with mobile phone and web-browsing facilities to the existing pager system. The primary feature of this device being compared to the conventional pager was its use as a mobile phone, but other features evaluated included the ability to access the internet, and reference data on the device. A crossover study was carried out for 6 weeks in 2004, with the team having access to the personal digital assistant every alternate week. The primary outcome measure for assessing efficiency of communication was the length of time it took for clinicians to respond to a call. We also sought to assess the ease of adoption of new technology by evaluating the perceptions of the team (n = 9) to personal digital assistants, by administering a questionnaire.ResultsDoctors equipped with a personal digital assistant rather than a pager, responded more quickly to a call and had a lower of failure to respond rate (RR: 0.44; 95%CI 0.20–0.93). Clinicians also found this technology easy to adopt as seen by a significant reduction in perceptions of nervousness to the technology over the six-week study period (mean (SD) week 1: 4.10 (SD 1.69) vs. mean (SD) week 6: 2.20 (1.99); p = 0.04).ConclusionThe results of this pilot study show the possible effects of replacing the current hospital pager with a newer, more technologically advanced device, and suggest that a combined personal digital assistant and mobile phone device may improve communication between doctors. In the light of these encouraging preliminary findings, we propose a large-scale clinical trial of the use of these devices in facilitating inter-professional communication in a hospital setting.

With the development of wireless Internet technology, mobile media, which is considered as the fifth media, has its great advantages on mobility and interactivity. Not only are the creation of mobile phone animation and its unique advantages popular with a number of animation fans but also they attract more people's attention. Combining animation with mobile media, this paper will analyze and summarize features and application classification of mobile phone animation to learn and explore the definition and features of mobile phone animation from multi-perspectives.

Recently, smart phones have become a shining star in the mobile phone market, and the services provided by smart phones have significantly increased due to the advancements in hardware development and the great variety of user interfaces. Also, the stress of modern life has given more and more importance to the recreation and game industries. Therefore, this study aims to integrate a smart phone with a digital game so that the player can have the feel of real actions and enjoy the interaction during the game. By combining a digital game with a physical device, i.e., a mobile phone, the game player is provided with a richer gaming experience in which the mobile phone serves more than as a phone, and the game is more than tapping at a keyboard or clicking a mouse. The digital game in this study is about fishing. The fishing games on the market are typically played with a keyboard or a mouse, which nevertheless makes the games quite different from the real fishing experience. For example, the existing fishing games can hardly simulate the action of casting a fishing rod or reeling in the fish on the hook. In this study, a simulated setting is designed to mimic real situations so that digital interaction between the human and the computer in a human-computer interface can be assessed. A digital interactive game including both hardware and software is designed in this study, and whether the interactivity and the human-computer interface of the interactive game are acceptable by players is studied. According to questionnaire survey results, most players give positive evaluation to the combination of the mobile phone (i.e., hardware) and the digital game (i.e., software), and the more interactive the human-computer interface is, the stronger the interest and the greater the pleasure a player will feel in playing the game. Suggestions on how to improve the hardware and software design are also provided.

Currently there are multiple types of mobile handheld devices supporting different data formats, image sizes and network architectures. The above situation results in the barriers of mobile learning promotion, such as cross-device digital content browsing, mobile learning content development and instructional course delivery. To eliminate the difficulties and to popularize mobile learning, a solution..AMPLe (Across Mobile Platform Learning system) has been developed. AMPLe is mainly aiming at 2 objectives: 1). Providing a simple editing and uploading method of digital materials to educators; 2). Delivering digital content to the learners using handheld devices like mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDA) and tablet PCs simultaneously. In order to evaluate the performance of AMPLe, the wetland crab observation in nature science course of elementary school was integrated into the system.

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a technique, Direct Pointer, that enables users to interact intuitively with large displays using cameras equipped on handheld devices, such as mobile phones and personal digital assistant (PDA). In contrast to many existing interaction methods that attempt to address the same problem, ours offers direct manipulation of the pointer position with continuous visual feedback. The primary advantage of this technique is that it only requires equipment that is readily available: an electronic display, a handheld digital camera, and a connection between the two. No special visual markers in the display content are needed, nor are fixed cameras pointing at the display. We evaluated the performance of Direct Pointer as an interaction product, showing that it performs as well as comparable techniques that require more sophisticated equipment.

This paper has described specialized zooming tools on mobile devices with designing and developing basic geometric and semantic zooming methods in order to increase the usability of the device. Based on three zooming methods, we created new zooming tools for the device by describing the detail prototype and implementation of these applications were introduced in this paper. However, we have problems because the tools were designed for the PDA simulation program in a desktop computer. So, we do not know how many different results exist between the application program and the real physical device. Especially, in terms of hardware, the current PDA does not have enough pixels, so users could potentially encounter broken characters when the magnifying glass is used. Although these zooming tools are not substantially implemented in commercial PDAs, it will be used for new interfaces in mobile devices by supporting various zooming functions. We look forward to continuing the research and development of this tool according to the future development of the PDA’s hardware performance and elements. Therefore, the biggest contribution of this paper is the creation of zooming tools on PDAs by encouraging the development of practical zooming methods over theoretical methods.

Handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs) have undergone continuous and substantial improvements in hardware and graphics capabilities, making them a compelling platform for novel developments in teleradiology. The latest PDAs have processor speeds of up to 400 MHz and storage capacities of up to 80 Gbytes with memory expansion methods. A Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM)-compliant, vendor-independent handheld image access system was developed in which a PDA server acts as the gateway between a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and PDAs. The system is compatible with most currently available PDA models. It is capable of both wired and wireless transfer of images and includes custom PDA software and World Wide Web interfaces that implement a variety of basic image manipulation functions. Implementation of this system, which is currently undergoing debugging and beta testing, required optimization of the user interface to efficiently display images on smaller PDA screens. The PDA server manages user work lists and implements compression and security features to accelerate transfer speeds, protect patient information, and regulate access. Although some limitations remain, PDA-based teleradiology has the potential to increase the efficiency of the radiologic work flow, increasing productivity and improving communication with referring physicians and patients.

There are many websites specially designed for mobile phones. Some hackers write automated programs to abuse these website services and waste the website resources. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between human users and computer programs. Methods known for achieving this are known as CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart). CAPTCHA methods are mainly based on the weaknesses of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) systems and ask the user to type a word. So using them is difficult in tools such as PDAs (Personal Digital Assistant) or mobile phones that lack a complete keyboard. In this paper, a new CAPTCHA system is proposed for touch-screen devices such as PDAs and mobile phones. In this system, a word is drawn in a random place on the screen and a number of arcs are drawn on the screen. Then the user is asked to highlight the word by the stylus. Due to the limitations of the PDA and mobile phone, OCR programs on these devices cannot recognize the shown word, while a human user can easily highlight the word. The proposed method is implemented by the JavaME (Java Platform Micro Edition) language and tested on a Sony Ericsson P990i mobile phone.

With the growing popularity of 3D content on handheld and embedded platforms and the recent availability of powerful 3D hardware on these devices, developers required a flexible and powerful 3D rendering API that was designed for the unique nature of handheld platforms. Because no existing API was directly applicable, the Khronos Group created OpenGL ES. OpenGL ES provided an immediately recognizable architecture (i.e. based on OpenGL), pared down (and in some dimensions extended) to match the needs of both the hardware platforms and content developers.This presentation will first discuss OpenGL ES version 1.1, contrasting it with "desktop" OpenGL 1.X. This includes not only discussing the differences in the APIs themselves, but also some of the reasoning behind these OpenGL / OpenGL ES differences. By discussing the reasoning behind these differences, the presentation seeks to explain some of the unique challenges inherent in current handheld platforms (as compared to desktop systems). The subsequent version of OpenGL ES (2.0) eliminates the fixed functionality of OpenGL ES 1.1 and replaces it with programmability controlled through the OpenGL Shading Language. A surface definition API called EGL will also be briefly discussed. EGL provides mechansims for creating and utilizing drawing surfaces for all of the relevant Khronos APIs..