Week10: Mobile Techbologies

Introduction

In the world of today, technology gets old pretty quickly & this is also the fact with mobiles & mobile technology. When you buy a new mobile phone it seems like it gets old within 2 months because the improvements are so frequent.

Technology Improvement

Mobiles have come a long way especially in these last couple of years. Screens got bigger, Battery life got longer, CPU speed has gone faster & many more. Here's a list of new mobile technologies:

•      Longer Battery life
•      Better Communication
•      Better & Bigger Screens
•      Faster CPU speed
•      Better antennas
•      GPS
•      Compass
•      Touch screens
•      Higher RAM Storage
•      Better Operating Systems
•      Apps
•      Higher Storage
•      Easier user input through touch screens

Service Improvement

In order to keep up with technology, even mobile service providers had to improve their services. We can recall to about 9 years ago where the internet didn't exists on your mobile, 7 years it did exist but it was excruciatingly slow which brings us to today where the internet connection on your mobile compares to that on your pc. With the improvements that will come during the next years, we will probably see a huge improvement on internet connectivity on the mobile phone.

Here's a couple of service technologies which evolved during the years:

• GPRS - Packet oriented mobile data technology
• EGPRS - Extended on above
• Edge - same as EGPRS
• 2g - Transformed the connected from analog to digital
• 3g - Data transfer can accommodate TV, internet & video calls.
• 4g - Mesh Network, can reach upto 100mb/s data transfer speed.

Security

With new technology always coming up, there is an issue with security. We have recently heard on the news that Apple has been tracking the locations of every iphone user and sending those locations back to Apple.

Lab Work

This week, we were assigned to acces this blog through a phone browser. Since I do not currently have a web-enabled phone, I decided to use an emulator which can be accessed at: http://www.opera.com/mobile/demo/


Here's a screenshot of the result:

Given this image, this blog shows that it is not optimized for mobile web browsers. Still it was pretty easy to navigate through the webpage because the elements are not compressed altogether. A simple solution would be that of Only showing the posts in a narrower width when a mobile browser is detected and eliminate all the other widgets & extra elements.