Wiley Professional Microsoft Smartphone Programming 978-0-471-76293-5 사용자 설명서

This category includes real-time, location-based navigation assistance coupled with traffic data access,
mobile gaming, rich media services, and so on. Mapping and GPS-based navigation services are increas-
ingly being integrated into general-purpose smartphone platforms. Mobile television services have been
available in the United States and some Asian countries; online music download services (such as
Apple’s iTunes service) are available on some high-end smartphones; mass media companies, music and
movie companies, online gaming service providers, and of course the consumer, will be involved in this
category of services and applications.

Needless to say, the aforementioned summary is by no means exhaustive; however, it is indicative of the
broad range of new services and applications with tremendous potential for businesses. Indeed, the
enormous opportunity of next-generation mobile computing has created myriad services and applica-
tions that will likely continue to mature and succeed in the foreseeable future. What all these services
and applications share is a reliance on software running on smartphones to reach the end user. To this
end, software designers and developers have to be aware of the challenges and obstacles involved in
smartphone-based application development.

Challenges of Smar tphone 
Application Development

The application design paradigm for smartphones not only differs largely from that of desktop applica-
tions, it also has some inherent requirements that separate it from application development on common
mobile devices. First, the hardware constraints of a smartphone, such as processor speed, persistent stor-
age capacity, battery, and wireless connection, significantly affect the application design principles.
Second, the input method of a smartphone, either a telephone keypad with additional navigation keys
or a soft keyboard, forces application developers to pay more attention to the GUI of a smartphone
application than that of desktop applications. Third, the cost of wireless data service remains a major
factor for mass adoption of Smartphone technology, as it is still quite high compared with the cost of
landline Internet services. Moreover, the application must be easily ported to various hardware plat-
forms using different processor architectures and peripherals. Following are the salient factors to con-
sider while developing applications for smartphones:

❑

Despite the advancements in mobile embedded

and wireless technologies, smartphones usually have neither a large memory capacity nor a reli-
able, high bandwidth wireless connection. It is crucial, therefore, to make better use of precious
local storage for high performance. The networking functionality of a smartphone must be able
to adapt to the comparatively low bandwidth and high drop rate of wireless links. Finally,
remote data access must be able to function in disconnected mode. For a more detailed discus-
sion of data access on a smartphone, see Chapters 5 and 6.

❑

Because entering characters on a smartphone is not as easy as

typing on a PC keyboard (although some teenagers will disagree), a program’s GUI has to deal
with most of the input by using graphical components. Due to a smartphone’s relatively small
screen, the layout of these components on a window, as well as the grouping of components
into different windows, has to been designed carefully. For example, you generally should elim-
inate horizontal scrolling for a smartphone application. GUI design is discussed in more detail
in Chapter 4.

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Chapter 1

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