The Future of Android

I read a really interesting Article on the growth of android over the past years. It also introduced some new products that will be hitting the market with android’s new ice cream sandwich os. The article talked about androids rapid growth and shows that it now holds 53% of the market. Over the past year android grew 11% from 42% and continues to be the most popular mobile operating system. This article continued to talk about a few new products that will be hitting the marked with android.

1)                   Shows a designer phone made by prada. Android it’s getting a new pretty face with this phone. Prada is trying to remove the nerdy geeky appeal of android and go for the fashanistas if you will.

2)                   The next is a $100 tablet. This caught my attention because it was exactly what the guys from one laptop per child were talking about. It will be interesting to see if it is really below the $100 bar. It states that the tablet will also have all the goodies. Camera, long battery life, nice size (tim’s favorite size 7inch). If a tablet with that amount of usability is released for under 100 dollars that could completely change the mobile market, making android readily available to almost everyone.

3)                   EE Pc will be replaced with a tablet linking to a keyboard to make up a small netbook! This would really give the user the best of both worlds. You could have the tablet for on the go and a keyboard to make typing and searching a breeze. I’m really excited to see how this android powered tablet/netbook will do in the next year

Finally the paper talks about Adobe changing its direction with flash.  It will no longer be aiming to support flash on mobile devices but aim for html5 and adobe air in native apps. This also caught my attention because one of the articles we read this summer was about html 5 and if we thought it would start to take over. I remember I was cynical and now it looks to be happening.

Article

 

Micro-Blog SkyNet

Micro-Blog: Sharing and Querying Content Through Mobile Phones and Social Participation

Abstract: When plugged into the

Internet, the collaborative inputs from phones may enable a

high resolution view of the world.

Wow this is a really cool idea.  With the advancements in mobile technology and decreasing cost of owning a smartphone an idea like this is more possible than ever.  It would be very cool to use a map and see what was going on all over the country. It reminds me a little of my app this summer Happytrack. The only difference is that Micro-blog is also incorporating sensors in the device. Example (accelerometer maybe a thermostat etc.) I think this is very smart but at the same time could be very scary. What if  certain apps secretly transmitted this information back random times. After designing apps this is very possible! This only thing that pops into my mind is SKYNET! Ahh.

Some of the challenges it Micro-blog would have to overcome would be short battery life with sensors on (gps etc) I feel with the advancements in mobile technology it wont be long until we can overcome the physical challenges of the devices. I think a tool like micr-blog could be very cool but would also scare me at the same time. The amount of data one company would have would be tremendous.

Mapping Urban Wireless Landscape With Argos

Mapping Urban Wireless Landscape With Argos

Argos = First urban scare wireless sensor network designed explicitly to support measurement of ambient Wifi traffic across an entire city

Goal -The goal of Argos is to enable urban-scale monitoring

of wireless networks, permitting multiple users to execute

queries against the captured traffic.

To be perfectly honest I don’t really see the point. Ok it would be cool to have a way to monitor everyone’s activity but it just seems already obsolete. With the move toward mobile devices and wireless being shared through cell towers I think wireless home networks will be decreasing. Argos sounds like a lot of upkeep planning hardware placement etc. the “edge” networks or cell towers can already monitor web access and data usage.  I think its a lot of work for not a very large reward.

Security. I don’t understand how it can bypass wireless security. I know its just monitoring packets but does argos have access to wireless packets without network passwords? I also feel its an invasion of privacy. I’ll bet a lot of people will be offended with this idea of “passive Monitoring”

Mist (Not to be confused with the Pokemon Trainer)

Mist

Mobile Internet Service Technology

Goal- is to measure and characterize cellular network performance on devices.

 

After reading this article all I have to say is GO MIST. I think mist is really important because there must be some way to measure network performance.  Our society today is completely run on mobile technology. As time passed its only going to become more and more reliant on it. To start the lightweight mist apps that run on java make it easy to run and collect data on a wide variety of devices.  I think java is also a very reliable language that will be around for a while so it’s a safe investment. Mist is really important for app developers so they can plan the amount of bandwidth that is appropriate for their apps.

I found the relationship between the app Developer and the network carrier to be very interesting. The App Developer needs the carrier in order to get to its customers and audience.  The carriers benefit from the app developers because it encourages users to download more information (ie more bandwidth more money).  It’s a symbiotic relationship. Anyway moving on. Mist is important to the app developer because they can tune their apps based on the networks they are on. If an app developer knows that they are on a slow network they may have a longer buffing time for a video app. or make the app stay connected to servers longer so it could continuously download information.  This information is crucial to creating successful apps.  With the Large expansion of mobile technology I’m all for the measurement of mobile internet service technology. I think it will be a crucial step in the future.

 

Fun fact = I learned that CDMA stands for (Code Division Multiple Access) and GSM stands for (Global Systems Mobile)