Cloud Computing Bible (2011)

Part V: Using the Mobile Cloud

IN THIS PART

Chapter 20

Working with Mobile Devices

Chapter 21

Working with Mobile Web Services

Chapter 20: Working with Mobile Devices

IN THIS CHAPTER

Learning about the cell phone market

Discovering the key smartphone Web features

Understanding how cloud services are changing phone services

Discovering the different smartphone operating systems

In this chapter, you learn about mobile phones and their interaction with the cloud. The impact that cellular phone technology has had on civilization is dramatic. The most popular consumer device is the Nokia 1100, and the billionth cell phone that Nokia sold was an 1100 in Nigeria. Cell phones have had nearly universal worldwide adoption.

Cell phones fall into two categories. As this chapter explains, there are feature phones, which are phones with added capabilities, and smartphones that run recognized operating systems, install applications, and have persistent Internet connectivity. Feature phones are being replaced by smartphones, and for many people in the world, smartphones are the only computer that they will ever own.

Cloud services are having a major impact on cellular phone technology, and vice versa. Many smartphones come with native applications that consume Web services, many of which are currently deployed in the cloud. Some of these applications do little more than point a micro-browser at a Web site that has been specifically formatted for mobile phone consumption. Other applications consume RSS feeds, and many more are simply frontends for applications that run in the cloud. Mobile application developers are staging their apps in the cloud, and a number of hosting services provide support for this. Amazon Web Service and the iAWSManager app are provided as an example.

The five major smartphone operating systems to consider are Google's Android, Apple's iOS (iPhone OS), RIM BlackBerry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile Phone. Each of these platforms supports installable applications, and Android and the iPhone support hundreds of thousands of third-party applications. Many of these applications running in part or fully in the cloud contribute greatly to the value proposition of these leading edge mobile platforms.

Defining the Mobile Market

Here's an astonishing figure to consider. As of 2009, the world's population was 6.8 billion people, and the number of mobile phones estimated to be in use was 4.6 billion units. That means that nearly 68 percent of the people in the world have a cell phone. In some countries people own multiple cell phones and the penetration of phones appears to be more than 100 percent of the population—which is physically impossible, of course.

The top 10 countries and the percentage of their populations with cell phones in 2009 were as follows:

1. China, 797 million, 60.8 percent of the population

2. India, 635 million, 53.8 percent of the population

3. United States, 286 million, 91.0 percent of the population

4. Russia, 214 million, 147.3 percent of the population

5. Brazil, 187 million, 97.6 percent of the population

6. Indonesia, 140 million, 60.5 percent of the population

7. Japan, 107 million, 84.1 percent of the population

8. Germany, 107 million, 130.1 percent of the population

9. Pakistan, 98 million, 59.6 percent of the population

10. Italy, 89 million, 147.4 percent of the population

Some experts have contended that the cell phone has done more to bring people out of poverty in the Third World than almost any other invention in history. The idea of grub-staking people with “40 acres and a mule” in the 21st century needs to be replaced by the phrase: “40 acres, a mule, and a cell phone.” With a cell phone in hand, a farmer in India or Africa can find out what crops to plant and which buyer to sell to with a phone call.

You may compare these numbers with the estimated number of personal computers in use worldwide in 2010, which according to the Computer Industry Almanac (http://www.c-i-a.com/compuseexec.htm) was 1.4 to 1.5 billion units, to judge how much greater the potential impact of cell phones is worldwide. Indeed, for nearly 3.2 billion people, their cell phone is potentially their main computing device, and the trends appear to favor increased cell phone penetration in the future.

Note

You can read the full list of countries and their cell phone usage on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use. The International Telecommunications Union does yearly studies of cell phone penetration. You can read its latest study at http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/publications/idi/2010/Material/MIS_2010_Summary_E.pdf.

Connecting to the cloud

One important trend fueling the rise of pervasive cell phone Internet access is the availability of mobile broadband to the world. When you examine the way in which people connect to the Internet as a function of the type of broadband subscription that is used, you find a dramatic increase in the number of mobile broadband subscriptions worldwide. Figure 20.1 taken from the ITU report illustrates these trends. This chart shows the percentage of inhabitants that have different types of broadband connections, and it is notable that mobile broadband subscriptions have doubled from 2005 to 2009.

FIGURE 20.1

Number of broadband mobile subscriptions per 100 users; source: ITU World Telecommunication/ICT indicators database

In 2009, the ITU estimated that there were 640 million mobile and 490 million fixed broadband connections. There are still many more cell phone users connected using low speed networks, but the trends all point to a dramatic shift to broadband over the next few years. There's plenty of room to grow broadband, because only 23 percent of people in developed countries have broadband access and 4 percent have access in developing countries. This study finds that the cost of fixed broadband Internet is a major impediment for its adoption, and presumably this factor favors mobile broadband connections.

Adopting mobile cloud applications

When you consider the term “mobile cloud computing,” you are describing a model where processing is done in the cloud, data is stored in the cloud, and the mobile device serves as the presentation platform or the display. For this model to work a phone, tablet, or laptop requires a reliable Internet connection and the ability to run a browser (a micro-browser, really) or another viewing application. Currently, most of the computing applications that run on mobile devices run on the local device itself, with a few exceptions. Those exceptions include applications such as Google Earth, Google Maps, the major cloud mail services, and applications that provide navigation, among others. For the most part, though, applications that run on the current generations of smartphones such as Android, iPhones, RIM BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile, among others, are processed locally on the phone. These smartphones are essentially miniaturized computers.

In 2009, cell phone sales totaled 1.2 billion units, while smartphones sold 172 million units. Smartphones currently represent only 14 percent of the overall market. While smartphone sales grew from a level of 139 million units in 2008 versus 1.2 billion sales of cell phones, it is and will remain for a while only a small albeit highly profitable part of the cell phone market.

When you live in the United States, Europe, or another affluent society, you tend to view the world through the prism of your own experience. Many readers of this book who are technological cognoscenti have smartphones, but most of the world's roughly 4.6 billion cell phone users do not; they have what are described as “feature phones.” What cloud computing offers the world's cell phone users is the potential to have a smartphone or rich Internet media experience on a cell phone and the potential for smartphones to become technologically “thinner” devices. By thinner, I mean that the devices will require less processing, consume less power, and have better battery life.

Currently, when you want to buy a cell phone or a smart phone, you trundle into a service provider's store and buy a phone that is supported by that network. To have an application run on the different cell phone types or smartphone operating systems, you need a Nokia developer, a Symbian developer, a RIM developer, an iPhone developer, and so on. When you develop an application for the cloud, you need just one type of developer and then all the connected phones can use that application. This is one of the main reasons why cloud computing represents a disruptive technology for mobile computing and cell phones.

Another reason is the avoidance of vendor lock-in. When you “commit” to a cell phone (particularly a smartphone), many people essentially lease these phones and are trapped in one- or two-year commitments. Worse than that, the data and applications they use are associated with their current phone and platform. Cloud computing frees those huddled cell phone masses yearning to be free from having to migrate their data and apps. If you think mobile service providers aren't concerned about their customers being free to vote with their feet, think again. The recent “announcement” (http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/) by Google and Verizon Wireless (with the support of AT&T) that they support a tiered pricing model for content transferred over wireless networks is nothing more than an attempt to control Web applications on their network and for Google to retain unrestricted access (for a cost) on willing carriers.

With such a large audience relying more and more on mobile technologies, and cell phones in particular, it is incumbent on software developers to think about extending their applications to the mobile space. What better way to do so than to build a cloud application? For mail servers, that means migrating your platform to a mail service. For a PaaS vendor such as Salesforce.com, that means modifying your Web service so the application can be experienced on the 960x640 pixel iPhone 4, the 480x800 HTC Touch HD, or the 360x480 BlackBerry 9500 (Storm). These are all relatively large displays that can render a window to a near-PC experience. Indeed, as Figure 20.2 attests, that's exactly what Saleforce.com has done with its Mobile Lite Service and Salesforce CRM Mobile Service applications for the iOS, Windows Mobile, and RIM operating systems, respectively. Mobile Lite is an extension of the Salesforce.com cloud service.

FIGURE 20.2

Salesforce.com's Mobile Lite (http://www.salesforce.com/mobile/lite/) illustrates an important trend in software to extend its products as cloud services for mobile access.

Feature phones and the cloud

Feature phones have nowhere near the resolution that the current smartphones do, nor is it likely that they will in the near future. A feature phone is more capable than a “dumb phone,” but often it has a screen that is limited to text or very low-end graphics. Feature phones own 83 percent of the cell phone market in the U.S. as of 2009, and they are categorized by having lower prices, longer battery lives, and simpler APIs. Of the top 10 best selling phones listed on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_phones), only the Nokia 5230, which runs Symbian OS v9.4, is a smartphone:

1. Nokia 1100 (200 million)

2. Nokia 3210 (150 million)

3. Nokia 5230 (145 million)

4. Motorola RAZR V3 (130 million)

5. Nokia 3310 (126 million)

As feature phones go upscale and smartphones extend their market downscale, the industry is beginning to add to inexpensive feature phones the capability to run lightweight operating systems such as Oracle's (nee Sun's) Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME; http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javame/index.html) or Qualcomm's Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW; http://brew.qualcomm.com/brew/en/). This gives feature phones the capability to run applications such as browsers that make cloud computing on these phones more attractive. Qualcomm is slated to add both the Opera Mini 5 and Opera Mobile 10 browsers to the Brew mobile platform. There's little uniformity in the features and interoperability in the micro-browser arena, but that could change quickly. While carriers have been quick to offer us repackaged games like Atari on feature phones, the race is on to move to Web applications at service providers like AT&T where a new messaging service has just been added for a number of their feature phones that provides access to e-mail, Facebook, and other services.

Feature phones are worldwide leaders today, but could rapidly be overtaken as the price of smartphones decline. All the trends point in that direction. Smartphones are up nearly 48 percent according to a study by AdMob (http://metrics.admob.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/May-2010-AdMob-Mobile-Metrics-Highlights.pdf) from Q1 2009 to Q1 2010 worldwide, while feature phones are declining. In Europe, where Nokia's Symbian S60 phones once dominated, their share has fallen to 7 percent, while Android and iOS dominate with a 16 percent and 73 percent market share, respectively. Indeed, worldwide smartphones account for 46 percent of the network traffic, feature phones account for 42 percent, and mobile internet devices (MID) account for 12 percent. Smartphones move roughly 30 times the data that feature phones do because of smartphone's use of applications.

The conclusion you can reach from this data is that phones are getting cheaper, and as smartphones become cheap enough, they replace feature phones. As feature phones are retired, newer lightweight operating systems are being added to lower-end phones to give them smartphone capabilities. Access to the cloud where data and processing are outsourced and the phone is a display platform will tend to level the playing field, making feature phones appear to be smarter and all phones cheaper.

Using Smartphones with the Cloud

There are many different ways in which you can define a smartphone, but these are the essential characteristics:

• A smartphone has a recognizable operating system.

• A smartphone can run installable applications.

• A smartphone offers advanced calling features such as video calls or conferencing.

• A smartphone offers messaging features.

• A smartphone comes with a touchscreen; the bigger the touchscreen the smarter the phone.

• A smartphone offers keyboard entry, either physically or virtually.

• A smartphone has a persistent Internet connection.

So my definition of smartphones goes like this:

Smartphones are small computers on which you can make phone calls, send messages, and access Internet data in real time.

So much for smartphones, but what about the cloud? As it stands today cloud computing is based around the idea that large industrial-sized information appliances can serve up data to any and all comers. The smartphone and eventually feature phones too, as well as tablets, laptops, and mobile internet devices, are all cloud clients. But smartphones and the cloud, well that is dynamite because the two technologies are synergistic: you couple a client that requires a ubiquitous service with a service that is ubiquitous, and then you provide the combination with a nearly universal worldwide market penetration. Each technology enhances and drives the other.

Consider what we haven't seen yet in smartphones that clouds can offer. If you move smartphone execution to a virtual machine running in the cloud, smartphones are no longer constrained by their processing power, memory, or storage capacity. The only two factors of importance are network bandwidth and display quality. You have to think that someone will build the equivalent of a thin client/terminal service using the cloud.

We also haven't seen phone networks using peering. If you design a phone so that each phone is a node in a large distributed network, then the overall computer has almost infinite capability and power. Some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world are built with large numbers of commodity computers in a cluster or grid, and some of the largest computing projects ever attempted run on the spare cycles of hundreds of thousands of computers. So why not a peer-to-peer cell phone network too? This isn't cloud computing, but it is something you have to wonder about.

One thing that smartphones have made perfectly clear is that people love apps. On the mobile platforms described in the following sections, each vendor (with the exception of Symbian) has an application marketplace. Each vendor also puts lots of effort into getting third-party applications written for its platform. Many of the applications using Web services are doing so through sites that are specially formatted for a particular platform. Nearly every major Web site or service has a version that is optimized for mobile computing and accessed using a mobile URL. When you point a micro-browser at one of these sites, you get a smartphone-optimized cloud-based experience.

Android

Android (http://www.android.com/) is the mobile device operating system originally developed by Android Inc., purchased and further developed by Google, and supported by the industry working group called the Open Handset Alliance (http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/). Android is based on Linux and GNU software. The software is licensed to OEMs under the Apache license. The current version of the OS is 2.2 and is called Froyo (for Frozen Yoghurt); the next two versions are codenamed Gingerbread, which is due out in Q4 2010, and Honeycomb, which will be released sometime in 2011.

Phones using the Android operating system were first sold by Google, branded as the Nexus One, and manufactured by HTC. A long list of these phones is maintained at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Android_devices, but many people will recognize current market leaders such as the HTC Evo, Hero, and Incredible, the LG Optimus, the Motorola Droid and Droid X, Samsung Galaxy, and Sony Ericsson XPERIA, among others on this list.

As of Q2 2010, Android was the leading smartphone OS in the U.S., and it sells worldwide at a run rate of 5 million phones per month. It has been remarked that as Windows was to Macintosh, Android is to the iPhone. Google's policy of licensing phones to all service providers and doing many incremental releases instead of Apple's yearly release is helping Android phones to pull away from the iPhone in terms of features and quality.

Android was built to serve as a mobile platform for Internet computing and, by extension, as a consumer or client for cloud computing services. The Android software is based on Java and runs in a Dalvik virtual machine. Among the core modules are a surface manager, the OpenGL and SGL graphics engines, SQLite RDBMS, WebKit rendering engine, and the OpenCore media framework.

The Android Market currently has 75,000 applications listed in it, and it's a very active site. According to some sources, 100,000 more applications have been submitted to Google for potential distribution. Google's participation in the Android Market has extended to offering several of its Web services in the form of Android applications.

Notably, you will find the following Google applications:

• Google Voice, the telephone service

• Google Finance, a financial service

• Google Translate, a language searching program

• Google Shopper, a shopping search program

• Google Listen, a podcatcher and player

• My Tracks, a jogging program

• Places Directory, for local search

• Google Goggles, an image recognition program

• Google Chrome to Phone Extension, which sends links and information from a Chrome browser to an Android phone

• Voice Actions for Android, a voice command and speech recognition program

The last two applications are new and worth a moment to consider. Google Chrome to Phone Extension places a button in your Chrome browser that can push links, maps, selected text, or phone numbers out to your Android phone. The application is available on Market and works for Froyo (Android 2.2).

Voice Actions for Android allows you to use spoken commands to control your Android phone. This includes dialing a contact, getting a map, sending text or e-mail, playing a music file, browsing the Web, and performing other actions. Voice Actions is accessed with the microphone button inside the Google search box on the Android home screen.

Cross-Ref

Many of these Google programs are described in Chapter 8.

The Android Market is available on Android phones through the Market application. Not all phones come with Market preinstalled. Market is a utility for downloading Android Package Files (APK) to the /data/app directory, where they require Linux root access to view and modify. A convenient place to browse featured applications is a showcase site that Google maintains, as shown in Figure 20.3.

FIGURE 20.3

Google's showcase of Android Market applications may be found at http://www.android.com/market.

Apple iPhone

The Apple iPhone is considered by many people to be the leading Internet-enabled smartphone in the market today. The first generation of the iPhone running the iPhone OS appeared in January 2007, and in every subsequent year, Apple has released a next generation model. You can view a list of iOS devices at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BlackBerry_products. The current generation is the iPhone 4, which runs the iOS operating system. The Apple iPhone and the iTouch (an iPhone without the phone portion) run a version of the Darwin operating system found in Mac OS X bundled with Core Animation software that supplies motion graphics routines based on OpenG ES 2.0.

The iPhone is really a handheld computer more than it is a phone, and the current model ships with two cameras for video telephony (FaceTime), GPS navigation, a three-axis accelerometer, a gyroscopic sensor, a proximity sensor, and a number of other built-in devices. Upon its introduction, the iPhone was noted for its multi-touch capacitive touchscreen, which accepts finger input and gestures, something that has become more common today.

The iPhone, like the iPod before it, is managed with the Apple iTunes program. It would be hard to overestimate the impact that iTunes has had on the music industry and that the App store has had on the smartphone industry. It is my impression that the overwhelming success of the App store caught Apple entirely by surprise. In the days when Personal Digital Assistants got apps from software vendors over the Internet, the experience was a miserable one. When you found an application, you needed to know if it was compatible for your device, how to install and use it, and how to manage and update it.

The App Store

What Apple did with the App Store is to create a unified distribution with a large installed based and an automated server push and client poll update service. This in turn gave developers a large installed base of devices to write to, a uniform set of tools to write with, and a mechanism for monetizing their applications. As a result, applications for the iPhone got much cheaper, and what an application lost in price, it made up in volume. Apple did for mobile applications what eBay did for auctions and Amazon did for books—with all the associated benefits and drawbacks. It is hard to imagine today a successful smartphone platform that doesn't also come with an application library service. There were in excess of 252,000 iPhone apps on the App Store as of September 2010.

The iPhone connects to the Internet either through Wi-Fi, wide area GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications), or an EDGE (Enhanced Data rates for GSM Evolution) network. Wi-Fi is an 802.11 standard, while GSM and EDGE are cellular phone networks. The iPhone 3g has a reported download speed of 7.2Mbps, and file transfers over cellular networks are limited in size to prevent congestion. There are no limits to file transfers over Wi-Fi. The large amounts of data transferred over the AT&T network have proven to be a problem for that service provider and have led to congestion in some major metropolitan areas.

Apple has not included support for Adobe Flash or Java on its platform or on the iPad, which means that many sites viewed within the Safari micro-browser are not completely rendered, something for which Apple has been criticized. Apple's contention is that Flash is very vulnerable software, and given the number of recent exploits who can argue with that point of view? Other people have suggested that Apple has excluded Adobe Flash to maintain control over the graphics part of the iOS 4 platform.

The iPhone has also been noted for being a good consumer of Web services, but according to some industry observers, due to the closed nature of the platform, it may be a bad potential consumer of many major cloud services that don't support Apple's native applications. Third-party applications that run on the iPhone can access cloud services with no problem, so the iPhone is a champion cloud client in that regard. (Indeed, my iPhone has 31 cloud applications on it out of my 72 total applications.) Many core Web services are locked out of the iPhone platform. For example, only recently did Apple add a streaming service to its iDisk feature of Mobile Me (see the next section). So it will be interesting to see whether Apple chooses to open up the iPhone to more cloud computing services as the platform evolves.

MobileMe

MobileMe is Apple's cloud service. This subscription-based Internet suite incorporates services that were once part of iTools and .MAC into a single collection adding tools for productivity, synchronization, and communication. The tools that are built into MobileMe use Ajax and DHTML to create the appearance of a desktop application inside a browser. The central application in the suite is Apple's hosted e-mail service. The home page for MobileMe is Me.com, shown in Figure 20.4.

FIGURE 20.4

Apple's Mobile Me (http://www.me.com/) contains a number of cloud services such as iDisk, hosted e-mail, and more.

MobileMe offers the following features:

• e-Mail is available at the @me.com domain for iOS, Mac OS X, and Windows OS; or through the Web interface at http://www.me.com. The older .MAC service used the domain Mac.com for e-mail accounts.

MobileMe Mail adds a number of features to hosted e-mail including better screen control and formatting, picture handling, and a rich Web experience. MobileMe Calendar is an updated version of the online calendar application.

• Online storage provides 20 to 200GB/month data transfer. Certain features such as the address book, calendar, notes, and to-do lists are synchronized between systems.

With MobileMe installed on Windows, you can synchronize data with your MobileMe account to Windows.

• iDisk is an online storage drive that can browsed and from which items can be shared. The sharing feature can be done by granting individual access or through a public folder.

• MobileMe Gallery is a photo- and video-sharing service.

• Find My iPhone is a device tracking service that shows a message or displays a sound when activated. You can also use this service to change the password or erase the memory of an iPhone remotely.

• iWeb Publish is a hosted Web site that can be accessed either through your own personal domain or through a personal page at Me.com.

• iChat is Apple's instant messaging service that interoperates with AIM.

If the iPhone, iTouch, and iPad have one Achilles heel, it is their relatively limited storage capacity. A capacity of 16, 32, or even 64GB isn't really enough to make these devices portable libraries in the way that a big 'ole hard drive is. This means that to consume mass quantities of media, these devices must rely on data transfer to the cloud. That's probably why Apple invested in the music streaming service LaLa.com. It is not improbable to believe that Apple will set up its media business so you can stream content from its servers to your Apple devices, move the content from an Apple device to other devices, and allow iTunes to wirelessly synch content. If Apple goes this route, then what you have is a situation where applications live on local devices and data is stored in the cloud.

iPhone apps hosting services

iPhone applications are hosted on the iTunes App Store, but many applications are heavy users of Internet or Web services and require dedicated infrastructure to stage. When an iPhone application is released, there is often no way to accurately predict demand, and success can hinge on the performance of the application at the time it was released. For this reason, many mobile developers are using cloud-based infrastructure for the elastic scaling of their Web services. There are several IaaS vendors available for deploying applications; RackSpace and Amazon Web Services are probably the two largest choices. RackSpace even has an app on the iPhone to manage its service deployments.

Amazon Web Services has a specific iPhone Application Hosting page, shown in Figure 20.5, for iPhone developers. As AWS notes, when you create an iPhone application, you can structure the application so it is a rich client frontend to services in the cloud. The full range of AWS is available for a deployment may be monitored and controlled; these various services were discussed in detail in Chapter 9.

Of course, if you are developing for the iPhone, you probably want to be able to control your infrastructure with an app. In Figure 20.6 is the iAWSManager, a third-party application that uses the AWS APIs to control the various components and instances you have running.

An advantage of Android and Windows Mobile is that they have their own dedicated infrastructure on which developers can host their applications, if they want to. For Google, that hosting service is the Google AppEngine and Google's infrastructure; for Microsoft, that hosting service is the Windows Azure Platform and Microsoft's infrastructure. Chapter 8 describes the Google AppEngine, and Chapter 9 describes Windows Azure in detail.

FIGURE 20.5

Amazon Web Service offers an iPhone application hosting service. To read about it, go to http://aws.amazon.com/iphone-application-hosting/.

FIGURE 20.6

There's a cloud app for that; iAWSManager lets you control your AWS EC2, ELB, S3, CF, SQS, and SDB Web services from an iPhone.

Research In Motion BlackBerry

The Canadian company Research In Motion BlackBerry mobile e-mail devices and smartphones are hugely popular with many devotees. BlackBerry owns 21 percent of the world's smartphone market, making it number 2 overall. President Obama is a well-known crackberry addict, as are many in government and large corporate enterprises. A “crackberry” is someone who is on their BlackBerry so much that it affects their normal lives.

BlackBerry started out as an enhanced pager in the mid-1990s and developed a push e-mail service that is well suited to business applications. You can find a list of BlackBerry models at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BlackBerry_products. The roots of the BlackBerry phones as a PDA can be seen in the way in which the BlackBerry OS structures its interface and in the range of applications it supports. The OS has support for both Java and WAP.

BlackBerry is known primarily for its messaging capabilities, which is probably the most advanced in the industry. In addition to push e-mail through Wi-Fi or cellular network connections, there are push notification services available from a range of cloud services such as Facebook, Myspace, Ebay, and others. BlackBerry has an IM service called BlackBerry Messenger, and it supports other IM services, such as Google Messenger, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger, which makes the BlackBerry the most agnostic and interoperable IM platform you can have. The newer BlackBerry devices come with the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) Instant Messaging application that can send media-rich instant messages to another BlackBerry whose PIN (eight-digit ID) are known. BBM supports location sensing, group communication, and (through third-party software) CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) and DBMS (Database Management System) systems.

The BlackBerry can also serve as a Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Domino, and Novell GroupWise messaging server client, synchronizing e-mail and calendar data. Large deployments of BlackBerry devices are supported by the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), which is an e-mail relay software add-on for Exchange, Domino, and GroupWise.

The BES Mobile Data-Service Connection Service (MDS-CS) can connect to mobile BlackBerry devices through a TCP/IP connection, and through the use of the API and Java ME runtime, developers can create applications that can communicate with these devices. Google offers a Connector to BES for Google Apps. Later versions of the BlackBerry do not require MDS-CS to connect to the Internet, but the connector is still required if you want to create a secure connection.

The BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) is the alternative connection for a BlackBerry that doesn't use the BlackBerry Enterprise Server as its connection. Communication between BlackBerry's servers and devices using the BIS are highly encrypted and compressed. The service is available in 91 countries and through nearly all the major cellular providers, and it's the way an individual would connect to a large service provider. BIS is provisioned by service providers, but the service runs on RIM servers. A BIS account gives a customer a POP3 and IMAP mail connection, up to 10 accounts, and access to other e-mail services such as AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo!.

BlackBerry supports an applications store called BlackBerry App World that isn't as extensive as its Android or iPhone competitors. The store opened in April 2009 and is available through the Blackberry via the App World application. Users can browse the store's catalog online using their desktops or other devices. Users can access this service using the BlackBerry App World 2.0 application, which was released in August 2010 and is part of BlackBerry OS 4.5.0 and later. Figure 20.7 shows the BlackBerry App World Web site.

FIGURE 20.7

BlackBerry App World is a new application store for BlackBerry devices. Browse applications at http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/appworld/.

Symbian

Symbian refers to the Symbian open-source operating system and the Symbian platform that runs the operating system on feature phones and smartphones made by various OEMs. Symbian is the leading platform for cell phones, with 41 percent of the world market, due primarily to Nokia's dominance in the industry worldwide for so many years. Nokia had an app store a decade ago for its phones, but never extended the concept.

The Symbian Foundation (http://symbian.org/), which maintains the open-source OS, was formed in 2009 by Nokia, NTT, Sony Ericsson, and Symbian Ltd., and the software is made available under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). The Symbian Foundation is an official backer of the Open Cloud Manifesto (http://opencloudmanifesto.org/) and runs many of its systems and services on the cloud.

The Symbian kernel, which is currently at EKA2, is a microkernel architecture designed to work with a single processor. Unlike other OSs, Symbian includes device drivers in the kernel itself. The Symbian^4 OS (to be released in 2011) uses the Orbit interface built on Qt application framework and libraries, and it comes with a graphics toolkit called avkon. Avkon is the next generation of S60 routines that take commands either from the device touchpad or a keyboard.

Starting with Symbian^3 in 2005, devices include a WebKit browser. The Symbian OS is modular with different technology domains, each containing software packages, and with each domain having its own separate roadmap. All the Symbian phones on the market are Symbian^1 or Symbian^2 phones. The Nokia N8 is the first Symbian 3 phone. No Symbian^4 phones have yet been announced. Wikipedia maintains a list of Symbian phones at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Symbian_devices. Symbian^3 and eventually Symbian^4 will lead to the release of next-generation smartphones that will be better cloud consumer devices. In this regard, it will be particularly insightful to see how the Nokia N8 is received; Nokia bills this device as a portable entertainment center and provides Web access to a variety of services native on the device, as well as various social networking features.

Windows Mobile

Windows Mobile is the last of the four major smartphone operating systems that this chapter considers. The platform has undergone continuous upgrade and revisions since it was first introduced in 2000 as the Pocket PC 2000. The current version of the operating system is Windows Mobile 6.5, with the new version called Windows 7 slated to release about the time this book appears in the stores.

Microsoft has worked hard to make Windows Mobile devices a natural extension for Windows developers upon which to position their products. The Windows CE 5.2 kernel is a suite of Microsoft applications optimized for a smaller display size and using the Windows API. Early editions of these devices had a Windows look and feel, and they required the use of a stylus, which made the screen look cluttered and data entry difficult. As the platform has developed, Microsoft has streamlined the interface and improved the product.

Given the compatibility of Windows Mobile phones with Exchange Server infrastructures and the ability to create Windows-based programs on a mobile platform, Windows Mobile phones have been popular with many businesses, but less so with the consumer, where phones based on this OS have been losing market share of late. The upcoming Windows Phone 7 continues the trend toward a more modern smartphone interface and is by all accounts a substantial departure from previous efforts.

Note

You can read more about the Windows Phone 7 in Paul Thurrott's Windows Phone 7 Secrets, Wiley, 2010.

Windows Mobile has always had strong connection to Microsoft Enterprise Server technology, but has never achieved great success in the consumer market. Windows Phone 7 is meant to rectify this situation. The emphasis in this new phone is on consumer experience, and there are smart links and features associated with social networking on the phone, as well as a completely new interface code named “Metro.” Microsoft has used several of the features of its Zune HD platform in its design of Windows Phone 7. One feature of note is a Bing button that launches that search engine directly and can use voice input. Figure 20.8 shows the Windows Phone 7 Web site.

FIGURE 20.8

The Window Phone 7 Web site may be found at http://www.windowsphone7.com/.

Applications for the Windows Phone 7 are based on the .NET Compact Framework 4, XNA, and Silverlight Applications. The applications that ran on older versions of Windows Mobile Phone will not run on the Windows Phone 7. Indeed, applications that run on Windows Phone 7 will run in some entirely new ways for Microsoft. The phone is much less customizable for OEMs than previous phones were, and even user access to the file system has been severely limited. The earliest versions of the phone will come with Internet Explorer Mobile and will initially ship without Adobe Flash or HTML 5 support. Flash support is expected a few months after launch.

Based upon what I've seen from Microsoft, I conclude that the company is a passionate supporter of cloud computing. As was discussed in Chapter 10, a significant portion of the company is currently working on projects related to cloud computing. Windows Mobile fits into the company's strategy of Software + Services by offering another platform on which Microsoft developers can stage their products and by using the Windows Azure platform through which cloud-based services can be delivered. In many ways, Windows Phone 7 and Azure represent a reboot for Microsoft's mobile business. The company has lots of experience in this area and a good strategy, so it will be interesting to watch the company's progress on this platform.

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the mobile phone market. In total, the cell phone market dwarfs the PC market, with a majority of the world's inhabitants owning one or more cell phones. Mobile phones are differentiated into feature phones and smartphones. Many more feature phones have been sold than smartphones, but the market for smartphones is increasing dramatically. It is anticipated that in the next few years smartphones will dominate the market.

Cloud computing offers the capability to run cell phone applications and Web services and to store data remotely. Many applications that run on smartphones, and in many cases features found in feature phones, are dependent upon the Web services found in the cloud. This trend is likely to accelerate. The eventual impact of the cloud on mobile devices will be to make them thinner (as a client), cheaper, and seemingly much more powerful.

Smartphone technology is advancing rapidly, and the market for them is very dynamic. In the past four years, Apple's iPhone has gone from 0 to more than 200,000 applications and has become immensely profitable. Google's Android phones seem to have an even faster trajectory. RIM BlackBerry has a leadership position in the messaging area—and a very large market share. The most dominant operating system is Symbian, which is losing market share but is developing new versions of its operating system. Even Microsoft's mobile platform is being relaunched with a brand new class of devices called the Windows Phone 7. It is likely that this market will support several successful operating systems and many different vendors and models for some time to come.