18-07-2012, 11:13 AM
Creating a Mobile City Guide
mobile city guide.doc (Size: 1.52 MB / Downloads: 46)
Abstract
This project is about the process of creating a mobile service with information for users who are out on
the town. The goal is to make an application for mobile phones that people will find useful for learning
about current events, restaurants, bars and pubs in the city of Trondheim.
The service that was created in this project was an application that shows the user at their current position
on a map. It will then display a number of data points surrounding the user. These points can symbolize
current events or places to eat and drink. Users can navigate around the map to see other data points, and
they can read further information on any point that is displayed.
The service was not tested on real users, but it was shown to fulfill a number of requirements and
assumed to be useful by testing it with some hypothetical scenarios.
Introduction
Motivation
In recent years, the opportunities for people to access information wherever they are has increased
significantly. New technology has made people more mobile, with almost everyone in society now having
tools for accessing the Internet wirelessly at their disposal. While technologies enabling this have existed
for a while, the real change has been in the areas of affordability and bandwidth, which have pushed the
use of wireless Internet access from a pure novelty to a tool which most people will use on a daily basis.
At the same time, third generation mobile networks are revolutionizing mobile Internet access, and other
technologies enabling the creation of new sorts of context-aware applications are becoming increasingly
common in mobile devices. Built-in GPS and Wi-Fi enable applications to take a user’s location into
account, and combined with constant Internet access this creates an opportunity to make very powerful
mobile services.
The goal of my project is to create one such application, with information on events, places to eat, places
to go out and many other types of businesses available to a user on their mobile phone. By taking location
into account, the user should have a simple, informative map-like interface that is appropriate for a small
mobile device. This should serve as a genuinely helpful and informative tool for use by both locals and
people visiting an unfamiliar city.
Mobile applications
The idea of developing standalone applications for regular mobile phones is a recent phenomenon. The
introduction of smartphones enabled the move from server based WAP solutions to standalone
applications, and introduced new opportunities for creating mobile services.
WAP
The first mobile services were based on WAP technology. WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) in
essence enabled mobile users to interact with custom made web pages, which could feature animation,
streaming media and downloadable music. WAP usage never took off in Europe and USA, because of
slow lines, lack of interesting content and poor usability. Japan’s version of WAP, the I-Mode service,
had a much higher adoption. This was done by avoiding most of the problems surrounding European and
American implementations, partly by creating it from the beginning as a source of entertainment
[TARIFIC 2001].
Smartphones
There is no widely agreed upon definition of what a smartphone really is, but it is often described as a
mobile phone that runs an open operating system, with the ability to add applications from third parties.
The first smartphones saw the light in the early 1990s, but were originally mostly a tool for advanced
business tasks. In the past couple of years, smartphones have become widespread amongst regular users,
which has created a new market for personal mobile software. This market will lead to a huge growth in
revenue for mobile content, with the European market reaching 11 billion Euros by 2012 [Frost 2008].
Wireless Internet access
Any system designed to present up-to-date data needs a way to access remote information. For mobile
systems, this means the device needs to access the Internet wirelessly. While mobile phones have had this
ability for many years, this was originally by using the phone as a modem and a traditional dial-up
service. Nowadays, wireless technology has matured and always-on wireless internet access from a
mobile phone is substantially faster, simpler and more economical than older solutions.
3 G and 3.5G
3G, used to describe the third generation of mobile networks, usually comes with a service for wireless
always-on data access from the mobile service provider. In a regular 3G network, speeds can vary from
about 100 Kbps to several megabits. With newer technologies like HSDPA, often dubbed 3.5G, the
maximum theoretical speed is 14.4 Mbps.
Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi is a trademarked name for the various IEEE 802.11 technologies that specify standards for wireless
networking. Operating in the unlicensed 2.4 GHz band, access is provided by a base station that is
connected to a wired network.
[Lehr 2002] points out advantages of each technology:
Coverage: While a single Wi-Fi access point has a range of up to 100m, several interconnected access
points can provide much greater coverage. However, the ability to connect to a 3G base station several
kilometers away, gives users this technology much more mobility.