Nokia Smarter Phones

T his is Pervasive Computing’s second special issue focusing on Smart Phones. For the past 10 years, mobile computing in general and smart phones in particular have been topics of great interest and innovation within the research and business communities. Last year, despite the economic downturn, well over a billion mobile phones were sold worldwide. At the same time these phones are getting smarter. Perhaps the most obvious advances continue to be the rapidly increasing computational power of handheld devices. CPU speed, memory size, storage capacity, and network speed continue their rapid improvement. Mobile phone cameras are much more powerful— they have more pixels, better optics, and faster capture times. And the imaging technology on phones has been signifi cantly improved using computational photography techniques. New connectivity options such as mini USB and new sensors such as low-power accelerometers and magnetometers have become commonplace. Geo-location, based on assisted GPS, Wi-Fi, GSM, and other techniques that came out of the research community, is becoming a “must have” feature of smart phones. There have also been dramatic innovations in mobile user interfaces, such as the multi-touch and motion sensing interface that was popularized by the iPhone. To the surprise of some industry watchers, rapid innovation in the areas of operating systems and application platforms for mobile phones continues. Android and the iPhone platforms have become available within the last three years, with Apple selling more than 17 million phones in under two years (30 million if you include the iPod touch). Today’s device designers can choose between Symbian, Brew, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, as well as a variety of lesser known software platforms. Although this proliferation of application platforms presents some challenges for application developers, it also encourages competition and innovation. These new full-featured operating systems, with downloadable marketplaces for applications (the iTunes App Store, Android Marketplace, and BlackBerry Marketplace, as examples), are changing end users’ perception of these devices: from simple phones to small, mobile computers. Mobile phones tend to be very personal devices. They’re intended to be carried wherever we go. It’s this property, as much as anything, that makes mobile phones so interesting to pervasive computing researchers. The hope is that powerful, personal mobile devices and related technologies will enable whole new classes of adaptive, context-aware applications. Many of the papers in this special issue offer new architectures, tools, and applications that point the way to this exciting future of the Smarter Phone. James A. Landay University of Washington