Software for wireless devices

SOFTWARE FOR WIRELESS DEVICES (Electronic Commerce) ID number: BU460 of (affiliation) Location of University:
Date of Submission: February 14, 2014
Estimated Word Count = 283 (text only)
Software for Wireless Devices
There are two main reasons why developing software for wireless devices is particularly quite challenging. First is the number of competing standards for application development on various mobile devices. This means the lack of a single uniform standard is cumbersome for the software developers as they have to customize the software for each type of device with which the application has to communicate. Second, software applications need to be adapted for the specific requirements of the mobile device such as small display screens, reduced bandwidth, a restricted memory storage capacity, and limited input capabilities (Turban et al., 2008, 425). The software developers have to anticipate special requirements and design the system differently such as by re-designing the software program to deal with a limited memory, for example.
The five major software components necessary in mobile computing include 1) mobile operating system such as Microsoft, Symbian, Linux, and other specialized operating systems, 2) a mobile application user interface which is the application logic in mobile devices to operate the various interface devices such as a mini-joystick, touch screen, thumb wheel, and jog dial, 3) the microbrowsers which are actually similar to standard Internet browsers but specially adapted to deal with the limitations in the memory, bandwidth, and smaller display screens of mobile devices, 4) the wireless application protocol or WAP which is the suite of network protocols to enable different kinds of wireless devices to access WAP-readable files on an Internet-connected Web server, and 5) various mark-up languages which is also an area that lacks a single uniform standard; examples of competing standards are wireless markup language (WML), the compact hypertext markup language (cHTML), and extensible hypertext markup language (eHTML).

Reference
Turban, E., King, D., McKay, J., Marshall, P., Lee, J., & Viehland, D. (2008). Electronic commerce 2008: A managerial perspective. New York, NY, USA: Pearson Learning Solutions.