Taking handheld devices to the next level

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.

During this decade, pixels have become mobile. Cell phones, PDAs, handheld gaming consoles and other similar devices start to have color displays by standard and color displays are hungry for high-quality graphics. QVGA and VGA display resolutions are common, requiring dedicated hardware for graphics acceleration. Color displays and open platforms also invite games and other applications, which build on the availability of robust graphics. Handheld graphics acceleration is close to its desktop and games console counterparts Ű with content running on an embedded version of OpenGL, the OpenGL ES 2.0, vertex and pixel shaders are a requirement. Floating-point accuracy, lots of texture surfaces, plenty of performance Ű handheld pixels are of good quality and there are lots of them. Handheld gaming drives the handheld 3D graphics performance, but unlike on desktops, vector graphics hardware acceleration will become an even widely spread requirement on new handheld platforms. Applications such as the device's main graphical user interface and interactive maps are driving these requirements. In addition to performance, a strong driver for vector graphics on handhelds is image quality.The first handheld devices, including cell phones, with dedicated 3D graphics accelerators have already hit the market. By 2010, a large number of new cell phones and PDAs will be enabled with hardware vector- and 3D graphics acceleration. The volume of graphics acceleration enabled silicon chips shipping for handheld devices is expected to be significantly higher than for desktop PCs and gaming consoles. This creates a lucrative platform for game and application developers who want to develop handheld content with high-quality graphics.As there are numerous different handheld devices, the industry is fighting against fragmentation Ű widely adopted platforms must be created to enable universal content development across a wide range of platforms and end devices Ű the platform race is already on.All in all, the industry is busy creating all the essential components to bring high-quality programmable pixels to handheld devices. Content developers are already up-to speed to provide winning content for these devices. All in all, the future of handheld pixels looks rosy!

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.

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.

Lessons not learned on data disposal

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.

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.

Chapter 4 - PDA, Blackberry, and iPod Forensic Analysis

Often mobile devices like mobile phones or personal digital assistants (PDA) are equipped with IEEE 802.11 WLAN adapters. Furthermore, within many buildings a WLAN infrastructure is available. The aim of this work is to investigate the quality of different indoor positioning methods based on values of WLAN received signal strength index (RSSI) using commercially available devices (mobile phones, PDA). Three positioning algorithms were considered: minimal Euclidian distance, intersections of RSSI-Isolines and a stochastic model based on Bayes' theorem. Two measuring testbeds, a museum's exhibition room and an empty seminar room, four different types of PDA (Dell, Fujitsu, HP, T-Mobile) and two types of access points (Netgear, Lancom) were used. Results show that positioning can be achieved with an average accuracy of approx. 2-3 metres. WLAN capable mobile devices behave differently in receiving RSSI values of a base station. For reasons of standardization a linear correlation between different receiving levels of PDA was investigated.

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.

Wireless technologies have transformed learning, teaching, and leading in K-12 schools. Because of their speed and portability, laptops, planners, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and cellular telephones are major components of digital literacy. In this chapter, current international trends in the educational uses of portable technologies will be discussed. The implications of newer hardware specifications and educational software applications for laptop computers will be analyzed, including inequities in student access to the handhelds. Next, the role of planners and PDAs as more recent instructional and managerial tools will be evaluated. This study also includes a review of the current debate over whether or not cell phones, especially those with photographic capabilities, should be allowed to be used by students in schools. Finally, potential uses of wireless technologies for interactive learning and collaborative leadership on a global basis will be investigated.

Physical browsing is an interaction paradigm that allows associating digital information with physical objects. In physical browsing, the interaction happens via a mobile terminal – such as a mobile phone or a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). The links are implemented as tags that can be read with the terminal. They can be, for example, Radio Frequency Identifier (RFID) tags that are read with a mobile phone augmented with an RFID reader. The basis of physical browsing is physical selection – the interaction task with which the user tells the mobile terminal which link the user is interested in and wants to activate. After the selection, an action occurs, for example, if the tag contains a web address, the mobile phone may display the associated web page in the browser. Physical selection is thus a mobile terminal and tag based interaction technique, which is intended for interacting with the physical world and its entities. In ubiquitous computing, the physical environment is augmented with devices offering digital information and services. Ubiquitous computing can be divided into two broad categories: distributed, in which widgets with user interfaces are embedded into the environment, and mobile terminal centred, in which the user interacts with the devices with a mediator device. In both cases, an important issue in ubiquitous computing is how to interact with the devices embedded into the environment. Physical selection is a direct selection technique for choosing a target in the mobile terminal centred approach. Computer-augmented environment is a concept very similar to ubiquitous computing. The concept grew from the combination of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality, but common to both approaches is the emphasis on the physical world and the tools that enhance our everyday activities. Another concept close to ubiquitous computing and computer-augmented environments is physically based user interfaces, in which the interaction is based on computationally augmented physical artefacts. Tangible user interfaces are based on tangible or graspable physical objects and are thus closely related to physically based user interfaces.

Increased motivation amongst pupils has been readily observed in schools when they are allowed to use computers and other forms of information and communications technology (ICT) (Cox, 1997; Denning, 1997; Wishart & Blease, 1999). In fact, Denning (1997) reports almost universal enthusiasm amongst students for the use of ICT to support their work in schools. That enthusiasm has been seen to double or triple amongst primary school students given a personal digital assistant (PDA) of their own (Whyley, 2006). These handheld devices are small computers that can be used both off- and online via wireless or mobile phone signals. Many psychologists (Light, 1997; Loftus & Loftus, 1983) have used behaviorist theories originating from the work of Thorndike (1898) to describe positive extrinsic reinforcements generated by or associated with the use of computer software. For instance, children find the use of a computer rewarding; they get nearly immediate feedback from the programs on their efforts, which often includes entertaining sound effects, graphics and animations. Therefore, they are more likely to take up opportunities to use ICT in and outside of lessons. What is more, as described by Loftus and Loftus (1983), these rewards arrive in the variable ratio schedule of reinforcement which Skinner (1938) believes is the most compelling.

As handheld computing is a fairly new computing area, there is as yet no generally accepted formal definition. For the purposes of this book, therefore, it will be defined as follows: Handheld computing is the use of handheld devices such as smart cellular phones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) to perform wireless, mobile, handheld operations such as personal data management and making phone calls. As explained earlier, handheld computing can take one of two forms: server- and client- side handheld computing, which are defined as follows: • Server-side handheld computing: Here, handheld devices are used to perform wireless, mobile, handheld operations that require the support of a server. Examples of such applications include: (a) instant messages, (b) mobile web content, (c) online video games, and (d) wireless telephony. • Client-side handheld computing: This refers to the use of handheld devices to perform handheld operations that do not need the support of a server. Examples of these applications include: (a) address books, (b) standalone video games, (c) note pads, and (d) to-do-lists. The terms “computing” and “programming” are sometimes confusing and often misused. It is important to remember that “handheld programming,” defined as programming for handheld devices, is different from “handheld computing” and is made up of two kinds of programming: • Server-side handheld programming: This includes the design and development of handheld software such as CGI programs that reside on servers. • Client-side handheld programming: This refers to the design and development of handheld software such as Java ME programs that reside on the handheld devices themselves. Server-side handheld computing and programming usually involve complicated procedures and advanced programming such as TCP/IP network programming. Here we will focus on the most popular server-side handheld application, mobile web content design and development, which can be conveniently considered in terms of three themes: • WML (Wireless Markup Language), which will be discussed in Chapters VI and VII, • WMLScript, which will be explained in Chapter VIII, and • database-driven mobile web content development, which will be covered in Chapter IX. Other kinds of server-side handheld applications, such as instant messaging, are related to advanced network programming such as TCP/IP and readers may refer to other technical reports or books for more information. The rest of this chapter describes the background and discusses system setup for server-side handheld computing and programming. A case study, adaptive mobile web browsing using web mining technologies, is given at the end of this chapter.

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.