Mobile Platform

The mobile platform is the combination of the hardware architecture of the mobile device and its operating system, both of them are the base of the mobile GIS that is installed and used on this platform.

Mobile Device Hardware

The mobile device has specific and unique characteristics, first it belongs to a single and unique person, it is a user identifiable device and two persons do not share the same mobile device such as desktops and land line telephones. Second, it is always-on wearable device. Third, the most used device all over the world, almost each adult holds one (Mateos and Fisher 2006). Mobile phone is considered the seventh mass media (wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_mass_media ). It has several realizations such as smartphone, PDA, intelligent device, handheld navigator and others.

The mobile device is a multi-objective equipment, with fundamental characteristics of small size and GSM connectivity, in addition to modern accessories such as digital camera, video recording, sound recording, GPS, A-GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, IrDA, FM receiver and transmitter, keypad (mobile phone or qwerty), processor, RAM, hard disk, and a small (touch) screen (2 – 3.5 inch). The mobile device is a cellular phone, executes computer programs, and connects to the internet and/or mobile/computer devices. The mobile device moves on earth, on water, on air, can be used indoor or outdoor.

The mobile device as all other hardware devices witnessed exponential development triggered by high demand at the global level and endless user requirements. It has the three main hardware components of the classic Personal Computer (PC) which are processor, RAM, and storage, in addition to other hardware peripherals and accessories.

The trend in hardware development for the last 30 years was in one direction cheaper price, better performance, and smaller in size (Bossler et al. 2005). The nanotechnology play a major role in leading the hardware industry in its direction.

16 From the Technology point of view, the mobile device is expanding, more users and more applications. The current approach to mobile device is to clone the personal computer capabilities with smaller size to provide mobility or to reduce the gap between the mobile phone and notebook. Another approach is to be considered as a separate device other than known computers and create for it separate environment as done by special mobile web pages to deliver web content to the mobile device. However, considering the mobile device as new separate device is important and constructs a new hardware and operating system capabilities to manage it. As an example, there is a variety of wireless network capabilities using close band width, it will be easier to the user if he/she can manage through one interface all the kind of wireless communications and GPS signals also.

Although this exponential development in all hardware components, one hardware item is required to be larger in size, which is the screen. The screen size of mobile device has huge impact on the internet industry. The web pages and internet browsers were designed for screens of 15” size and larger. The huge content of the internet faced a serious challenge when displayed on the screen of mobile device and this was overcome by designing special pages for mobile browsers, and the geovisualization of spatial data on mobile device also is suffering from the same symptom: screen size. To understand the impact of the screen size on the ICT as whole, we should refer to the critique of Bernard-Lee to ICANN against mobile web as it will split the internet seamless and heterogeneity which were reserved for all its short and important life and for the first time it will make it device dependent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Web).

The significant hardware component to geoinformatics is the GPS receiver of the mobile device. It can be embedded inside the device or separated from it and connected via bluetooth or direct cable. The capabilities of mobile device are augmented by adding GPS chip to it, so that it knows its absolute position. These two features, wireless components and their attached peripherals to a single unified computer. The operating

17 system of any computer including mobile devices, performs two main functions, the first is extending the machine into a virtual friendly machine where the user and programmer can access its resources without going to a deep level. The second function is managing the hardware complex resources such as processors, timers, memory, I/O devices, and many others (Tanenbaum 2008).

The major operating systems installed on desktop computers are Linux which is open source based on Unix, and Windows family from Microsoft. Both have great impact on the development of operating systems for mobile devices.

The mobile device has its own family of operating systems, some are open source while others are licensed. Figure (3.2) describes the worldwide shipment percentage of different operating systems for mobile devices in 2009. Also, Table (3.1) lists the basic data about the most popular mobile devices.

Almost the operating systems are based on simplified Unix kernel while Windows Mobile family is based on win32 API libraries.

Table (3.1) List of most popular operating systems for mobile devices

Operating System Owner Processor Royalty Special Features

Symbian Nokia ARM, Intel Free C++

RIM Blackberry Intel Propriety QWERTY KB

iPhone Apple ARM Propriety Touch Screen

Windows Mobile Microsoft ARM, Intel Propriety C++

Android Google ARM, Intel Free

The manufacturers of mobile devices are going to make the operating system for their devices more and more free and open source to encourage programmers to develop more applications on it. Symbian from Nokia became open source in February 2010, Android from Google is also open source, while iphone, RIM and Windows Mobile are licensed. In general, the design basics of mobile operating systems are towards multimedia, real time applications and wireless communications.

From 1970, when Bell labs produced the Unix OS (Operating System) and C programming language, no breakthrough was achieved up to present. All other developments in operating systems were based on interfaces and ease of use. Same

18 thing for programming languages, they were built around C language and object-oriented concept. Although Java represents a breakthrough to produce portable executable programs cross-platforms without the need of re-compilation, but it is still not matured. Research in operating system and programming languages are needed mainly for the benefit of parallel processing, security and privacy protection, networking, and embed geospatial data as essential element in operating systems, programming and query languages.

Figure (3.2) Share of 2009 Smartphone shipments by operating system by Canalys From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone (accessed 22 Apr 2010)

The law of Moore about the prediction of hardware development (Moore 1965) is also applicable to mobile devices, however, there is no equivalent prediction for operating systems development. The current operating systems for mobile device (and for PC) lack of standards. Although the PC has Microsoft Windows as de-facto standard, there is no similar standard for mobile device. The operating systems for mobile devices (and PC) do not have spatial capabilities and needs new concepts to accommodate the exponential advancement of hardware.

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