Integrated usability model for the multimedia mobile device development

The value of a mobile communication device is its ability to organize and access important information quickly. Mobile devices are often associated with the cutting-edge technology of the last 4 years. Although having gained an increasing popularity over recent years, mobile devices have a history of 15 years. The first generation of mobile devices was the analog mobile phone. They were large and cumbersome, resembling a small briefcase. With the launch of the second generation, mobile phone units became smaller and easier to handle. Currently, third-generation phones are starting to be released, advancing in design and dynamic capabilities. By the year 2005, 76% of consumers will own an Internet compatible device, 66% will own a cell phone, 45% will own an Internet cell phone, and 10% will own a personal digitial assistant (Forrester, 2001). In today's information surge, business never stops. IDC Research has forecasted that an average of more than 36 billion person-to-person e-mails will be sent daily by 2005 (Juptner, 2001). Hence, mobile communication plays a major role in the success of most of today's business operations (Jones, 2001), and all businesses are continually faced with the challenge of engaging with the rapidly changing information technology age. One area of mobile communications that has been growing exponentially is mobile computing. Keywords: code division multiple access (CDMA); general packet radio service (GPRS); global positioning system (GPS); Internet cell phone; mobile communication device; personal digital assistant (PDA)

Recently, smart phones such as the Galaxy S and IPhone, and tablet PCs such as the Galaxy Tab have been introduced and become widespread in the market, thus the environment for wireless Internet services has been improving. As the market has improved, consumer preferences for mobile devices and the relationship between these devices and wireless Internet services regarding consumer preferences have become a very important issue. However, although there have been a considerable number of studies on the demand for mobile devices, it is not easy to find previous studies on the relationship between consumer preferences for specific attributes of wireless Internet services and the demand for mobile devices. The main purpose of this study is to analyze which mobile device is more likely to be preferred or become the main channel for wireless Internet services and how the demand for each mobile device is influenced by consumer preferences for specific attributes of wireless broadband Internet services used on it, and to induce managerial implications based on the main findings. To derive the results on consumer preferences, conjoint analysis is used. The survey was conducted using 1,000 Korean consumers. In the survey, respondents are allowed to choose more than one hypothetical alternative representing a mobile device combined with a certain type of wireless broadband Internet service if they desired. To estimate the consumer preferences quantitatively, a multivariate probit model is used. According to the estimation results, owing to their portability, smart phones are more likely to become a major channel for wireless Internet services despite their drawbacks in terms of display size and performance. Portability is the most important factor affecting the choice of a mobile device when using wireless Internet services. Therefore, manufacturers of mobile devices for wireless Internet services should improve the overall functionality and performances of mobile devices without negatively affecting portability. However, at the same time, consumer preferences for specific attributes of wireless Internet services are found to affect the demand of each mobile device much differently. Therefore, the prediction that smart phones will be the prevalent mobile device for use of wireless Internet services can be somewhat changed, depending on which and how wireless Internet services are provided to each mobile device and how they affect the demand for each mobile device. As mentioned above, there are significant differences between mobile devices with regard to the effects of mobility, data transfer speed, type of contents or Internet interface for wireless Internet services. It is found that the mobility of wireless Internet service is highly valued for smaller devices, but not much for notebook PCs. In contrast, data transfer speed and similarities in the type of contents or Internet interface to those provided by fixed broadband Internet services become more important for larger mobile devices. Thus, it is necessary for wireless Internet service providers to differentiate and optimize their contents and Internet interfaces properly for various mobile devices. Additionally, it is reasonable that manufacturers of smart phones focus on mobility and portability (or convenience) rather than adding sophisticated functions or pursuing higher-level specifications. Further, for smart phones, for which mobility and convenience are important, wireless Internet service providers should develop and provide easy and convenient programs, rather than advanced programs that require high device performance. Lastly, with respect to individual demographics, young and highly educated people are more likely to be consumers of newly introduced mobile devices for using wireless Internet services. Therefore, these young and highly educated consumers should be considered a major target for manufacturers of mobile devices for wireless Internet services.

Personalized mobile English vocabulary learning system based on item response theory and learning memory cycle

This paper reviews major issues of mobile technology and mobile web usage among university students, including characteristics, importance and problems faced by university students when accessing web sites through mobile devices. This article also reviews the technology adoption models/theories that will best explain the adoption of IT/IS. The author identified Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as the best model in explaining adoption of mobile web because TAM is the most suitable in explaining behavioural intention in the context of mobile devices. Mobile Web is the World Wide Web which is accessed through a mobile device such as laptop computer, smart phone or tablet. It establishes the entirety of the Internet and is not limited to webpages which have been specifically designed to be viewed through mobile devices. Distinctive features of mobile technology especially mobile web technology and its progressive impacts on information transfer and learning process has created many educational opportunities for higher education institutions. Although mobile devices are highly flexible, accessible and convenient, students are still facing great problems when they use mobile web for educational purpose.

The popularity of hand-held mobile devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDA) and smart cell phones, is growing. Compared with traditional desktop computers, these mobile devices have distinct limitations, including tiny displays, scarce computing hardware resources, bandwidth fluctuations, ad-hoc communications, voluntary, and involuntary disconnections, etc., presenting new challenges to human-computer interaction on mobile devices. In this paper, we survey research efforts done on mobile device user interface design. Some recently developed techniques for diverse information presentation via visual, audio, and tactile channels are reported. We also brief on our experiences in virtually presenting database query results on PDAs, including both presentation style and presentation content.

CAD data visualization on mobile devices using sequential constrained Delaunay triangulation

The inadequate availability of medical information has often made health care services in many developing countries cumbersome with enormous paper work, waste of life, time and resources, long queues, and ineffective treatment procedures. The use of mobile technology devices such as Personal Digital Assistants, Cell phone, Tablet PCs etc for health care delivery promises a revolution in modern health care. However, applications that provide access to real-time patients and research information at the point-of-care via mobile devices are at best in their low stage of adoption across the health sector. In this paper, the experience gained in designing mobile health care applications is used to proffer e-Education functionalities in the design of healthcare systems to enhance their acceptance in the medical domain. The application discussed uses, the Unified Modelling Language, mobile, and Java-based technologies for its development. The application provides a real-time access to medical information at the points of health-care delivery within health care centres.

The mobile revolution is finally here. The evidence of mobile penetration and adoption is irrefutable: smartphones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable game devices, portable media players, MP3 and MP4 players, tablet PCs, and laptops abound and can be found everywhere. Also, the increasing availability of high-bandwidth network infrastructures and advances in wireless technologies have opened up new accessibility opportunities (Kinshuk, 2003). No demographic is immune from this phenomenon. People from all walks of life and in all age groups are increasingly connected and communicate electronically with each other nearly everywhere they go (Wagner, 2005). The development of and adoption rate of mobile technologies are advancing rapidly on a global scale (Brown, 2005). Since 2000, there is considerable interest from educators and technical developers in exploiting the universal appeal and unique capabilities of mobile technologies for the use in education and training settings (Naismith, Lonsdale, Vavoula, & Sharples, 2004). The use of mobile technologies to support, enhance, and improve access to learning is a relatively new idea and many learners are quite comfortable with various mobile devices. Mlearning (mobile learning) is consequently an emerging concept as educators are beginning to explore more with mobile technologies in teaching and learning environments. Already, there are numerous applications for mobile technologies in education—from the ability to transmit learning modules and administrative data wirelessly, to enabling learners to communicate with instructors and peers “on-the-go” (Brown, 2005).

Mobile banking, sometimes referred to as M-Banking, Mbanking or SMS Banking, is a term used for performing balance checks, account transactions, payments, credit applications and other banking transactions through a mobile device such as a mobile phone or Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). Mobile banking has until recently most often been performed via SMS or the Mobile Web. Apple's initial success with iPhone and the rapid growth of phones based on Google's Android (operating system) have led to increasing use of special client programs, called apps, downloaded to the mobile device hence increasing the number of banking applications that can be made available on mobile phones . This in turn has increased the popularity of mobile device use in regards to personal banking activities. Due to the characteristics of wireless medium, limited protection of the nodes, nature of connectivity and lack of centralized managing point, wireless networks tend to be highly vulnerable and more often than not they become subjects of attack. This paper proposes to identify potential threats associated with communication between a mobile device and the back end server in mobile banking applications. The paper should be able to identify the techniques associated with Man in the middle attacks during communication between a mobile device and a back end server and propose controls that will ensure that data theft does not occur during such sessions.

There is no doubt that the use of wireless andmobile networks and devices is growing. From the1990s onwards, we have been witnessing a great shift in methods of doing business with the emergence of the electronic commerce (e-commerce). Academics, businesses, and even individuals have been focusing on this new way of conducting business online. Advanced and mature wireless and mobile technologies facilitate e-commerce conducted from a wired network to a wireless network. Mobile commerce (m-commerce) can be viewed as a subset of e-commerce and refers to bany transaction with monetary value that is conducted via a mobile network .When users conduct e-commerce such as e-banking or purchase products, they do not need to use a personal computer system. Indeed, they can simply use some mobile handheld devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) and mobile phones to conduct various e-commerce activities. In the past, these mobile devices or technologies were regarded as a kind of luxury for individuals. However, this situation has changed. The market for mobile technologies has seen significant growth in the past few years. This is creating a new opportunity for the growth of m-commerce. According to a study conducted by Datamonitor, global m-commerc revenues will amount to $131.7 billion by 2017.

The explosive growth in the number of mobile devices such as Internet-enabled cellular phones, wireless handheld devices, wireless laptops, and tablet PCs has driven the corresponding growth in applications for mobile computing. These applications usually belong to one of two classes: collaborative applications and individual application. While collaborative applications require several mobile devices to work together and include peer-to-peer computing and grid computing, individual applications are local to the mobile device and its user. In this paper, we present a framework that allows mobile devices to collaboratively work on a computationally-expensive problem. Such a problem is decomposed into smaller tasks and distributed across other mobile devices willing to share their computational power with others. This framework is based on the paradigm of grid computing applied to the domain of wireless mobile devices. This paper presents our current implementation of the framework architecture and simulation of its functionality. Also, we focus on the issues of mobility, QoS and network stability and their effect on the performance of our collaborative problem-solving framework.

We as humans often use language as a bridge to connect and communicate with each other. Globalization has played a role in bridging the gap through languages acknowledged around the globe, one of these that took center stage in becoming a truly global language is the English language. One of the biggest benefactors of a global language is the mobile device. however, mobile devices would be able to play the role of cementing the English language in its importance. Therefore, this research aimed to learn how effectively can the perception of mobile devices be helped in learning the English Language, with the research focusing on higher educational environments such as university students in Batam City. This research was quantitative research using the Technology Acceptance Model and had dependent variables covering attitude towards using, and the behavioral intention of using. A total of 384 Respondent’s data was collected for this research. In the end, the conclusion was that Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL) is proven to be effective in affecting those that used it. However, this would not discredit those that didn’t have the intention to learn through a mobile device in the first place or those without a mobile device.

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.

The extended use of mobile multimedia devices in applications like gaming, 3D video and audio reproduction, immersive teleconferencing, or virtual and augmented reality, is demanding efficient algorithms and methodologies. All these applications require real-time spatial audio engines with the capability of dealing with intensive signal processing operations while facing a number of constraints related to computational cost, latency and energy consumption. Most mobile multimedia devices include a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) that is primarily used to accelerate video processing tasks, providing high computational capabilities due to its inherent parallel architecture. This paper describes a scalable parallel implementation of a real-time binaural audio engine for GPU-equipped mobile devices. The engine is based on a set of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) modelled with a parametric parallel structure, allowing efficient synthesis and interpolation while reducing the size required for HRTF data storage. Several strategies to optimize the GPU implementation are evaluated over a well-known kind of processor present in a wide range of mobile devices. In this context, we analyze both the energy consumption and real-time capabilities of the system by exploring different GPU and CPU configuration alternatives. Moreover, the implementation has been conducted using the OpenCL framework, guarantying the portability of the code.

This paper presents method for acquisition and processing status data of mobile devices. In this research smartphone, tablet PC, VANET or MANET nodes are regarded as mobile devices. The proposed method utilizes gathering information about state of hardware modules and network around the mobile device. Then the acquired information is processed in order to determine the metrics of mobile device which is a structural element of MANET and VANET, or software update packets distribution network, or user data exchange network. The method is implemented in a form of a client-server application. The goal of the client part is a device data acquisition, i.e. battery charge level, RAM and CPU load, signal level and type of the wireless network in use. The goal of the server part is to receive data about the status of the mobile device and check its validity. After that the acquired data is used to generate the map of signal level distribution and to calculate and send the metrics to the mobile devices.