Mobile Phone Platforms Clause Samples

Mobile Phone Platforms. There is currently a wide range of mobile platforms available on the mar- ket. From a functionality perspective, devices from different vendors in both the feature phone and smartphone categories offer similar function- ality. The chief differentiating factor among feature phones is thus the set of features offered by the concrete device, while in the smartphone space, devices mostly compete on the hardware level, differentiating themselves with CPU clock speed, memory, or camera and screen resolution. All major smartphone platforms on the market today contain support for accessing the phone’s hardware functionality, such as the various com- munication channels or sensors available in the device. However, porting an application from one platform to another may be more or less difficult depending on the specific language and toolset required by the platform to build applications. We will therefore refrain from discussing the technological specifics of individual platforms and instead provide a brief, high-level overview of the most important platforms from a developer’s perspective. Nokia S40 – a feature phone platform used on Nokia phones. The plat- form does not have its own API for third-party application develop- ment; instead, it supports the Java ME environment, allowing for in- stallation of Java MIDlet applications. Access to specific phone func- tionality, such as messaging, PIM, Bluetooth and others, is facilitated through optional Java ME APIs. The platform does not support mul- titasking [32]. Symbian/Symbian S60 – a smartphone platform and operating system cur- rently maintained by Nokia. The system uses a realtime microker- nel with support for pre-emptive multitasking and memory protec- tion [34]. Symbian supports two main software development languages 1. Devices with dual-core 1+ GHz CPUs, such as the Samsung Galaxy SII or HTC Sensa- tion, were just being introduced on the market at the time of writing this chapter. and platforms – Java ME and C++. Older versions of the operating system/platform used a system spe- cific version of C++ called Symbian C++ that contained specific lan- guage constructs and deviated from standard C++ [35]. Newer Sym- bian versions use the Qt SDK along with standard C++ as the main development environment for the platform. Applications for iOS are mainly distributed via Apple’s App Store, following their submission and review process by Apple. Access to the distribution channel is not free, however, and developer...