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The market for cell phone operating systems is highly segmented. Many cell phones run operating systems other than Microsoft Smartphone; indeed, Microsoft is relatively new to the cell phone platform market. The stronghold in this market is Symbian OS, which is funded and supported by cell phone makers such as Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Siemens, and others. Palm is historically strong in the PDA market. For people with a background in those types of platforms, it is necessary to present a quick tour into Microsoft Smartphone. Those of you who have used a Smartphone device for some time can feel free to skip this section.

To a typical user, a Smartphone is a much more powerful cell phone. It provides many more types of applications, and the user interface is more sophisticated than a traditional cell phone. Like most other cell phones, a Microsoft Smartphone actually refers to a combination of the handset and its running applications. The aesthetic design of a smartphone handset may vary significantly, but the principle user interface - how a user interacts with the device - is almost the same across different devices from different manufacturers. Let's take a look at the Smartphone emulator, a software tool that helps developers quickly develop and test Smartphone applications without using a physical device.

Although color doesn't appear in these screenshots, a color screen at the top and the number keys at the bottom are the most common elements. What separates a Smartphone from a PDA are the software keys. Notice the two soft keys (left and right) directly below the screen. These correspond to the menu bar and commands at the bottom of the screen. Depending on how applications define the functions of the menu bar, these soft keys may perform specific tasks. Also note the five-way (up, down, left, right, and "Select") navigation pad and the four fixed function keys: Call, Home, Hang Up, and Back. Pressing the Call key will bring you to the phone call screen, where you can enter a phone number. After you enter a phone number, pressing the Call key again will initiate the call. The Hang Up key, of course, is used when you want to end a call. The Home key always takes you to the home screen shown in this figure, and the Back key enables you to go back to the previous screen. At the home screen, pressing any number key will automatically bring you to the phone call screen.

A Smartphone usually has a power button, a record button (for voice recording), and two volume control buttons. Some Smartphones have a built-in camera, so there will be another button for it (some have a high-quality digital camera, such as Nokia N90, which features a Carl Zeiss lens, 2-megapixel resolution, and a 20x zoom).

The first-generation Smartphone applications are mostly clones of desktop Windows applications, enabling users familiar with those desktop applications to avoid learning a new one. Typical Smartphone applications are Pocket Outlook, calendar, contacts, Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, Windows Media Player, MSN messenger, games, and some accessories. The second-generation Smartphone applications are exclusively designed to leverage the advantages of mobility and ubiquitous wireless access. In the next several years we will see a whole new set of applications that utilize real-time location information in conjunction with always-on wireless data access.

Overall, the design of a Smartphone aims to take advantage of a user's prior experience with Windows desktop systems. After all, a Smartphone is a small computer running a stripped-down version of the Windows operating system. This greatly helps users familiar with Palm or Symbian cell phones because the learning curve is largely eliminated.

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With the vision of mobile convergence supporting communication and computing on a single set of hardware components, mobile wireless network operators, cell phone manufactures, and independent software vendors are working together to create new applications and services with the hope of taking a lead position in the next wave of mobile computing. These services and applications essentially leverage the increasingly high computing capability supplied by the cell phone and the flexible, high-speed wireless connectivity to offer an efficient, reliable, and rich experience to the end user. This section summarizes the potential services and applications in this domain.

Mobile Commerce
This category includes mobile banking, location-based business information service and shopping assistance, mobile advertising, and mobile payment, among other services. Japan and Korea already offer widespread mobile payment applications that enable consumers to make purchases at a convenience store by waving the cell phone past a reading device. Numerous startup companies in the United States are developing applications that enable credit card payments to be verified, parking fees to be paid at the meter, and social networking. Industries involved in this category include banks, credit card companies, retail stores, stock trading agencies, and online businesses.

Mobile Enterprise
Services and applications in this category are concerned with mobile worker assistance such as real-time job scheduling, route planning, package delivery updates, mobile collaboration and communication, and mobile business transaction. Moreover, enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and supply chain management (SCM) systems can be extended to support mobile access and onsite processing. In addition to mobile enterprise, law enforcement, educational, and healthcare organizations may also utilize these services and solutions to improve productivity and reduce costs.

Other Mobile Software Platforms
Symbian OS is developed by Symbian, a company supported by several cell phone manufacturers, including Nokia, Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung. Originally based on the EPOC operating system, Symbian OS defines several UI reference models for different types of devices. Symbian OS uses EPOC C++, a pure object-oriented language, as the supporting programming language for both system services implementations and APIs. It also allows Java applications for mobile devices (Java 2 Micro Edition, J2ME, applications) to run on top of a small Java runtime environment. The Symbian Developer website (www.symbian.com/developer) provides numerous technical documents for Symbian OS, SDKs, and sample code, as well as information on Symbian OS development and the Symbian developer community.

Palm OS, developed by Palm Inc., is a preemptive, multitasking operating system for Palm PDAs and cell phones. Palm OS supports both the ARM and Motorola 68000 architectures. Developers can choose a programming language from C, C++, Visual Basic, or Java, although C is most widely used for Palm OS software development. Interested readers can visit the Palm OS developer site (www.palmsource.com/developers) for more technical details. Palm OS application development is facilitated by the Palm OS 68K and Protein SDKs and some commercial developer suites. A developer suite is an integrated software tool that enables developers to create both ARM-native and Palm OS Protein-powered applications for Palm OS Cobalt and 68K applications.

Mobile Data Service and Entertainment
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 increasingly 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 applications 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.


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The worldwide mobile wireless industry is quickly moving from traditional, voice-based cellular phone services to combined voice and data services, as a result of increasing demand for mobile data access and the deployment of high-speed wireless data services utilizing a variety of wireless technologies. For example, 2.5G/3G wireless services are being rolled out and used by a rapidly growing number of subscribers, and the number of WiFi hotspots and residential wireless LANs continues to grow substantially. The trend is clear: Cell phones, PDAs, and portable consumer electronic devices will likely merge into a single, handheld device as a universal personal communicator and computing platform (generally called a smartphone). Indeed, the market has seen a dramatic increase in smartphone sales when compared to the fairly slow growth of PDA sales worldwide.

Generally, a smartphone is a powerful, multi-function cell phone that incorporates a number of PDA functionality, such as a personal scheduler, calendar, and address book, as well as the ability to access Internet services and applications using either a keypad or a stylus. In addition to making a call from a smartphone, users can surf the web, check e-mail, create documents, play online games, update schedules, or access an enterprise network via a virtual private network (VPN). Wireless Internet access is enabled by means of cellular wireless networks - such as GSM/GPRS, CDMA, CDMA2000, or WCDMA, among others.

Bill Gates, Chairman and then Chief Software Architect of Microsoft, introduced his vision for the smartphone at the 2004 Mobile Developer Conference:

The pocket devices, phone and PDA, really the trend is to have the best of both together. The phone is no longer just a voice-only device; more and more it has that rich, color screen. A PDA is no longer a disconnected device; more and more it's got the ability to make calls and connect up to wireless data networks. In many cases that will be both the wide area data networks, 2 G or 3G networks, but also increasingly you'll have WiFi connectivity built into the device as well. So it will be able to connect up to whichever network is available, whichever one provides the best bandwidth and economics there.

An increasing number of high-end cell phones and smartphones are equipped with powerful mobile processors (such as ARM processors), 64–128MB memory, 256–512MB flash storage, and even 2–4GB hard drives. Examples include the Motorola Q, SPV C600, and O2 XDA II. Some smartphones are PDA-based with handwritten recognition or a tiny keyboard, and phone functions as add-on features, such as Palm Xplore and Palm Treo. In fact, cell phone manufacturers and PDA manufacturers have different views regarding the future of smartphone devices. Unsurprisingly, each camp believes their device will prevail, with add-on functionality of devices from the other side. As wireless technologies and the mobile market continue to evolve, it is still too early to tell which approach will finally win. Nevertheless, one thing is certain: They both need reliable, high-performance, low-power consumption operating systems and software to leverage the wireless services.

Microsoft Smartphone refers to Microsoft's platform for next-generation cell phones - basically a software architecture with Windows CE as the operating system, plus a rich set of applications such as Pocket Internet Explorer and Pocket Outlook and powerful software development tools such as .NET Compact Framework and Visual Studio 2005. (We use Smartphone to refer to Microsoft Smartphone throughout this book and smartphone to refer to general multifunction cell phones.)

This book focuses on software development issues and practices on smartphones running Microsoft Windows Mobile software. There are, of course, other software development solutions. For example, Palm Inc., also provides a software development kit (SDK) for Palm OS smartphones, and you can find an SDK and supporting tools for Symbian OS, another popular cell phone operating system.

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