Lesson 3: MOBILE COMPUTING

Intended Learning Outcomes

At the end of this module, the students should be able to:
 give brief overview of mobile computing;
 explain the dimensions of mobile computing; and
 specify the limitations aligned with mobile computing.

Introduction
Mobile computing is a generic term that refers to a variety of devices that allows
people to access data and information from whatever they are. Mobile computing
embraces host of portable technologies that makes Internet Access on the go not only
possible, but integral to everyday life.

BRIEF OVERVIEW OF MOBILE COMPUTING

Mobile computing is a technology that allows transmission of data, voice and video
via a computer or any other wireless enabled device without having to be connected to a
fixed physical link. The main concept involves:
 Mobile communication
 Mobile hardware
 Mobile software

Mobile computing systems are computing systems that may be easily moved
physically and whose computing capabilities may be used while they are being moved.
Examples are Laptops, Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), and mobile phones. Mobile
computing can be distinguished through the tasks that they are designed to perform, the
way they are designed, and the way in which they are operated.

MOBILE COMMUNICATION
 The mobile communication in this case, refers to the infrastructure put in place to
ensure that seamless and reliable communication goes on.
 These would include devices such as protocols, services, bandwidth, and portals
necessary to facilitate and support the stated services.
 The data format is also defined at this stage. This ensures that there is no collision
with other existing systems which offer the same service.

MOBILE HARDWARE
 Mobile hardware includes mobile devices or device components that receive or
access the service of mobility.
  They would range from portable laptops, smartphones, tablet PC’s, Personal
Digital Assistants.
 These devices will have a receptor medium that is capable of sending and
receiving signals.
 These devices are configured to operate in full-duplex, whereby they are capable
of sending and receiving signals at the same time.
 They do not have to wait until one device has finished communicating for the other
device to initiate communications.

MOBILE SOFTWARE
 Mobile Software is the actual program that runs on the mobile hardware. It deals
with the characteristics and requirements of mobile applications.
 This is the engine of the mobile device. In other terms, it is the operating system
of the appliance (device). It is the essential component that operates the mobile
device.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MOBILE COMPUTING

 500 B.C. Abacus
 1642 Pascaline is the first calculator to be invented
 Late 1960s networking allowed computers to communicate
 1960s the military used various forms of wireless communications such as
electromagnetic waves
 1970s communication satellites began to be commercialized
 19773 GPS or Global Positioning System was invented
 1980s cellular telephony technologies became commercially viable
 1990s were witness the advances in cellular technologies that made wireless data
communication financially feasible in a universal way
 1997 802.11 or Wifi was invented and today, there are a plethora of wireless
technologies that allow reliable communication at relatively high bandwidths
 Wireless telephony has become the major provider of a revenue stream that is
being invested into improving the infrastructure to support higher bandwidth data
communications.

MOBILE WIRELESS
In wireless connectivity, mobile computing devices found a great way to connect
with other devices on the network.
 Wireless communication systems are a type of communication system.
 Wireless communication systems do not use a waveguide to guide along the
electromagnetic signal from the sender to receiver. They rely on the mere fact that
 electromagnetic waves can travel through space if there are no obstacles that
block them.
 Wireless communication systems are often used in mobile computing systems to
facilitate network connectivity, but they are not mobile computing systems.
 Also, though it is important to understand that stationary and mobile computing
systems are inherently different, this does not mean that they do not have any
commonalities.
 There are four pieces to the mobile problem:
o the mobile user
o the mobile device
o the mobile application, and
o the mobile network.

Types of Mobile Computer Devices

Mobile computer devices are designed to be portable, often to fit on your lap, in
the palm of your hand or in your pocket. With some mobile devices, you can do many of
the things you do with a desktop computer while you are away from home or traveling.
Features in mobile computer devices include batteries, video camera, camera, voice
recorder and music player. Laptop computers, tablets, smartphones, e-readers and
handheld gaming devices are five types of mobile technology used to connect to the
Internet and communicate with others.
1. Laptop Computers – are personal computers that are easy to carry and use in
various locations. The laptop has an all-in-one design with built-in touchpad, keyboard,
monitor and speakers. Laptops also offer you the option of connecting to a larger
monitor, regular mouse and other peripherals.

2. Tablets – are also designed to offer portability. However, they provide you with a
computing experience different from laptops with the biggest difference being that
tablets do not have a touchpad or keyboard. Basic features of tablet computers
include:
 Mobile OS: Tablets run on mobile operating systems different from their
desktop counterparts. Examples include Windows, iOS and Android.
 Solid-state drives: Tablets use solid-state drives, which are faster and more
durable than hard disk drives.
 Wi-Fi: Because tablets are optimized for Internet use, they have built-in Wi-Fi.

3. Smartphones – A smartphone is a powerful mobile phone capable of running

applications in addition to providing with phone service. These devices have most of
the features available on tablets along with cellular Internet connectivity. Cell phone
companies offer data plans that offer you Internet access anywhere with coverage.
4. E-Readers – E-readers, or e-book readers, resemble tablet computers' but that they
are mainly designed for reading digital and downloadable documents. E-readers have
either an LCD or e-ink display.
 LCD Display: This is the same screen found on laptops and tablet computers.
This type of screen is suitable for viewing books and magazines with photos
because the LCD screen can display colors.
 E-lnk Display: E-ink is short for electronic ink and usually displays in black and
white. It is designed to offer you the look of an actual page in a book. Unlike
the LCD display, the e-ink version is not backlit, so text is readable even
outdoors in full sun. E-ink displays offer a reading experience with less
eyestrain.
5. Handheld Gaming Devices – Handheld gaming devices are portable, lightweight
video game consoles that have built-in game controls, screen and speakers. Basic
features of handheld gaming devices such as Nintendo 3DS and PS Vita include:
 Online access to free and paid games
 Access to online movies, TV shows
 Social media apps
 Web browsing
 Online and local multiplayer support

Trends in Mobile Computing

Enterprise mobility is driven by the need for seamless access to information
anytime, anywhere and from any device. However, mobility has far-reaching effects on
the enterprise in areas such as security risk, use policies, manageability and governance.
 Tailor — Made Experiences. Now businesses are creating mobile applications
application that are focused on user experience and interactions which are
customized to them and their context.
 Globalization. Businesses globally are focusing on creating apps that support
multiple languages and multiple cultural traits that enhance user experience.
 Narrow Target Audience. For mobile computing, understanding the new trends,
it is important to cater to the niche audience. Create innovative apps for niche
applications that will give back more returns on effort.
 IoT Approach — Internet of Things. Create a mobile app strategy accordingly
where your mobile app is mobile device enabled portal to a range of omnipresent
network and Internet-Connected devices.
 Free Always Sells. Create mobile apps that can be integrated in to the app eco
system so your mobile application is not just lying around with the other less used
applications. Allow mobile app to be flexible with time and the changes that are
expected in the technology industry
ESSENTIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MOBILE APPLICATIONS
Mobile application development is surely a larger field and still enormously growing
industry across the globe, created new opportunities of modern businesses and
introduced new technologies. The most common attributes are largely based on service
design level, so if used wisely then the apps will be really useful covering user's
requirements.
 Connectivity. This is an important characteristic of mobile application to be
available anywhere. Otherwise actively called service to get reaction is worthless
in mobile environment. The ability of push becomes essential in growing apps on
every Smartphone as this characteristic keep the app in user minds.
 Localization. Localize info and the opportunity to provide position based
information is critical feature that craft mobility stunning and practical. It works like
elimination of chaff from the wheat, thus embeds the app according to user
context. The feature may not be perfect for every apps but it a good thinking to
associate location with note or photo and limiting possible options and/or sorting
places. The feature beautifully adds good user experience.
 Convenience. A simple and emotional design guarantees high value and
acceptance among users. The overall usability and information structure must be
planned carefully to build a joyful and fit interaction flow. Surely a good content is
a plus point while analyzing user requirements and crafting useful idea out of this
is also essential.
 Approachable. Approachability covers additional trait provided by the mobile
apps nature. This feature is in the sense of up to date information and usefulness.
Think of time aware options and relevant content round the clock.
 Individualization or Personalization. Creating individualized content based on
personalized context or usage is another feature.
 Security. There are several aspects of security like transferred data over network
via carrier network. Some applications sync data with online, web apps, so the
storage of the information on server must be secure. Another critical security
breach can be the mobile device itself.
DIMENSIONS OF MOBILE COMPUTING
The dimensions of mobility refers to the tools that allow us to qualify our problem
of building mobile software applications and mobile computing systems. These
dimensions of mobility are as follows:
 Location awareness
 Network connectivity quality of service (QOS),
 Limited device capabilities (particularly storage and CPU),
 Limited power supply,
 Support for a wide variety of user interfaces,
  Platform proliferation, and
 Active transactions.

Location. A mobile device is not always at the same place: Its location is constantly
changing. The changing location of the mobile device and the mobile application presents
the designers of the device and software applications with great difficulties. However, it
also presents us with an opportunity of using the location and the change in location to
enhance the application. These challenges and opportunities can be divided into two
general categories: localization and location sensitivity.
 Localization is the mere ability of the architecture of the mobile application to
accommodate logic that allows the selection of different business logic, level of
work flow, and interfaces based on a given set of location information commonly
referred to as locales.
Localization is not exclusive to mobile applications but takes a much more
prominent role in mobile applications.
Localization is often required in stationary applications where users at
different geographical locations access a centralized system.
For example, some point-ofsale (POS) systems and e-commerce Web sites
are able to take into account the different taxation rules depending on the locale of
the sale and the location of the purchase.
 Location sensitivity is the ability of the device and the software application to
first obtain location information while being used and then to take advantage of this
location information in offering features and functionality.
There are a variety of methods for collecting and using the location of the
user and the device. The user may simply be prompted for his or her location, but
this would not make a very user-friendly application.
Imagine a system that can only give you directions to where you want to go
if you know where you are: It will be useful often, but occasionally, you would not
know where you are or it would be too difficult to figure out your location. The
device may be reset for a relative location if it has the ability to sense motion and
can keep track of the change of location for some period of time after this reset.
Most location-sensing technologies use one or more of three categories of
techniques:
o Triangulation - relies on age-old geometric methods that allow calculation
of the location of a point that lies in the middle of three other points whose
exact locations are known.

o Proximity - Proximity-based methods measure the relative position of the

unknown point to some known point.
 o Scene analysis – Scene analysis relies on image processing and
topographical techniques to calculate the location of the unknown point
based on a view of the unknown point from a known point.

Quality of Service. In the case of wireless network connectivity, physical conditions can
significantly affect the quality of service (QOS). For example, bad weather, solar flares,
and a variety of other climate-related conditions can negatively affect the (QOS). This
unreliability in network connectivity has given rise to the QOS field and has led to a slew
of accompanying products. QOS tools and products are typically used to quantify and
qualify the reliability, or unreliability, of the connectivity to the network and are mostly used
by network operators. Network operators control the physical layer of the network and
provide the facilities, such as Internet Protocol (IP), for software application connectivity.
Usually, the QOS tools, run by the network operators, provide information such as
available bandwidth, risk of connectivity loss, and statistical measurements that allow
software applications to make smart computing decisions.
The key to designing and implementing mobile applications is that network
connectivity and QOS need to be taken into account with an expanded scope. Most
software applications, mobile or not, take advantage of networking in some way and,
therefore, do have network connectivity features.

Limited Device Storage and CPU. No one wants to carry around a large device, so most
useful mobile devices are small. This physical size limitation imposes boundaries on
volatile storage, nonvolatile storage, and CPU on mobile devices.
Smaller devices are easier to carry and, consequently, may become more
pervasive. This pervasiveness also largely depends on the price of the devices. Making
electronic devices very small normally increases the cost, as the research and
development that go into making devices smaller are very expensive.
Storage and processing issues are largely addressed by the various operating
systems and platforms on the mobile devices. Therefore, a large part of engineering
mobile applications requires first a theoretical understanding of the various types of
platforms and operating systems available on mobile devices, then an understanding of
the available commercial implementations of the varieties of types of operating systems
and platforms and the type of applications best suited for each platform—device
combination.

Limited Power Supply. Batteries are improving every day and it is tough to find
environments where suitable AC power is not available. Yet, often the user is constantly
moving and devices are consuming more and more power with processors that have
more and more transistors packed into them.
 The desirability of using batteries instead of an AC power source combined with
the size constraints creates yet another constraint, namely a limited power supply.
Some platforms allow monitoring of the remaining power and other related power
information. Some platforms allow multiprocessing and multithreading, which have an
effect on the control over the variation of the CPU activity, which in turn has an effect on
the control over the power consumed by the device. Overall, the design and
implementation of the application itself is affected less by this dimension of mobility than
by any of the others. This is merely because operating systems handling the power
consumption issues.

Varying User Interfaces. Stationary users use non-mobile applications while working on
a PC or a similar device. The keyboard, mouse, and monitor have proved to be fairly
efficient user interfaces for such applications. This is not at all true for mobile applications.
Examples of some alternative interfaces are:
 Voice user interfaces
 smaller displays
 stylus and other pointing devices
 touch-screen displays, and
 miniature keyboards

User interfaces are difficult to design and implement for the following reasons:
 Designers have difficulties learning the user's tasks.
 The tasks and domains are complex.
 A balance must be achieved among the many different design aspects, such as
standards graphic design, technical writing, internationalization, and performance,
multiple levels of detail, social factors, and implementation time.
 The existing theories and guidelines are not sufficient. Iterative design is difficult.
 There are real-time requirements for handling input events.
 It is difficult to test user interface software.
 Today's languages do not provide support for user interfaces.
 Programmers report an added difficulty of modularization of user interface
software.

Meyers recognizes the problems associated with user interfaces of stationary

computing systems. These problems are compounded by the multichannel requirement
of mobile systems. Multichannel systems are systems that use multiple types of user
interfaces for input and output such as text, voice, and video.
Since the recognition of the complexity of designing user interfaces by Meyers and
others, some headway has been made in providing us some tools to reduce this
complexity.
Platform Proliferation. Because mobile devices are small and there is much less
hardware in them than in a PC, they are typically less costly to assemble for a
manufacturer. This means that more manufacturers can compete in producing these
devices. These cheaper, and typically smaller, devices are often used for special
purposes. The sum of these and other similar reasons gives rise to proliferation of the
types of devices in the marketplace that an application must support.
Platform proliferation has very significant implications on the architecture,
design, and development of mobile applications.
Platform proliferation heightens the importance of designing and developing
devices independent of the platform. Writing native code specific to the mobile device,
unless absolutely necessary because of performance requirements, is not a
recommended practice because of the proliferation of devices.
For example, it is not wise to write a voice-driven phone book application that runs
only on one type of platform. Of course, the platform makers and manufacturers of
devices and operating systems of those devices will always try to create restrictions on
the developer to prohibit writing platform independent applications. They may conversely
give the developer features that may only be implemented on their platform to tie the
developer to that platform. Regardless of the efforts of commercial platform builders, the
software architects and developers should be focused on their primary task of meeting
the user's requirements. And if these requirements include support of multiple platforms,
which happens more frequently than not for mobile computing systems, platform
independence should be on the top of the architects' and developers' list when choosing
the tools to build an application.

Active Transactions. Most of today's stationary applications have a restriction that can
reduce the benefits of a mobile application system enormously: The user of the system
must initiate all interactions with the system. We call such systems passive systems
because they are in a passive state, waiting for some external signal from the user to tell
them to start doing some particular thing. With stationary applications, this typically works
well. Most people sit down to use a computer because they intend to perform some task.
Whatever actions they may perform could signal one or more other passive systems to
perform some computing task such as retrieving information or calculating some
numbers.
At the same time, during the past two decades, messaging-based systems have
been born and have evolved. With messaging systems, any one participant of the system
can send a message to the other participant(s), and, if desired, under a specific topic in
an asynchronous manner.
 Push systems, by definition, are active systems. For example, a particular user
could be browsing the Web and, while purchasing some goods online, be notified
 of the change in the price of a particular stock. In this example, the system has
taken an active role in starting communication with the user on a particular topic.
 Push—pull systems (a more complete name for push systems as the receiver of
the "pushing" is said to be "pulling" on a particular topic) can be implemented in a
number of ways, including using event-driven systems, messaging middleware,
and poll-based systems. Implementation aside, unfortunately, push systems have
mostly been a disappointing failure. One of the reasons for this failure has been
that most push pull systems have targeted users who are largely focused on the
task at hand.
Synchronous active transactions can be summarized by a set of properties:
 The transaction is initiated by the system, and during the same transaction, the
user is given an opportunity, for a finite period of time, to respond to the action
initiated by the system.
 Synchronous active transactions require a timely response from the user.
 The interactions between the system and the user work in a sequential and serial
manner during a synchronous transaction.
 Synchronous active transactions are established between the system and a single
user. This may be replicated for many users, but at the most elemental level, there
is only one user in each active transaction.

References:
3G E-Learning LLC, USA (2018). Mobile Applications Development Technologies

Smith, Amelia F. (2020). Simplified Introduction to Mobile Application Development for

Novices and Dummies