Mobile Technologies

When shopping to buy any product, everyone wants the best thing possible, and it has no different with satellite TV.The top question comes to our mind to do findind best satellite TV deal through either DISH Network or DIRECTV. One thing to look when looking for a good DIRECTV deal is the company selling you the service. Because DIRECTV is a $30 billion dollar company, they don’t just sell their satellite TV service through their own sales force, they have several re-sellers. A second option and our recommended choice here at Dish Television for getting a great Direct TV Deals is going through an online retailer. Online re-sellers do not just take orders over the internet, they also provide toll-free numbers for potential customers to call if they want to place their order with a live human, or if you have questions about packages, pricing, local channel availability, or anything else related to setting up your new DIRECTV service. The DIRECTV can focus 100% of their time and energy on you the customers. You can be sure of excellent customer service from start to finish. There are many Direct tv offers releasing often. So you can often get a better deal than if you had set up with DIRECTV itself.

Adobe Flash Lite or more commonly Flash Lite is a mobile multimedia supporter developed for the support of heavy weight graphics on the mobile phones. Flash Lite was developed by Adobe Systems as a derivative of Adobe Flash Player (Previously Macromedia Flash Player). It was intended to support the multimedia contents on the mobile as they were supported by the Flash Player on personal computer. Adobe Flash Lite is mostly used on PDA’s rather than on mobiles. Lite relies on two tier architecture with Lite forming the client side. Other than multimedia content, Lite can also access and utilize Java scripts and XML files. Till date five versions of Flash Lite has been released by Adobe systems. The last version of Lite has been known by the name Adobe Flash Lite 3; it was released on February 2007. The major advantages of Flash Lite are, it has a powerful a powerful IDE for development namely Adobe Flash IDE. It is platform independent and supports WORA (Write Once, Run Anywhere) methodology. Instead of using a collection of resource files, Flash Lite can pack all the resources in a single file itself. But still due to various reasons, Lite is supported only by PDA’s and small group of mobile phones.

It is possible to perform some banking operations from the mobile itself. It is called by the name Mobile Banking. Mobile banking was introduced in the year 2007 only; it is a very new service available in the mobile. Mobile banking supports operations like balance checks, account transactions etc. The SMS (Short Message Service) system available in the mobile phones is used to perform mobile banking in ordinary cell phones. Internet connectivity available in some sophisticated models is also used for mobile banking but SMS system is more used in common. Banking over the internet requires the client to use some special application that can connect over the bank’s server. Mobile Banking Model is a three layered architecture it has three layers or it supports three types of operations. The layers are Mobile Accounting, Mobile Brokerage and Mobile Financial Information Systems. Though only one percent of the global mobile population is involved in mobile banking today, it is expect that thirty five percent of population will indulge in mobile banking by 2010. The introduction of 3G and Smartphone has increased the mobile bankers’ population by great extent. However lots and lots of mobile phone models are available in the world today and still it remains a great task for banks to offer device specific banking.

WAP which is expanded as Wireless Application Protocol is the browser standard which allows internet browsing on mobiles and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistance). WAP is built around OSI Networking Model. A WAP browser provides all the services provided by a computer browser with some semantic modifications that allows web pages to be rendered on the mobile phones. WAP supports pages that are written in a browser language called WML (Wireless Markup Language). If the websites that are not scripted on WML are accessed from the mobile, the WAP browser automatically converts the script of the page to WML format. Before 1997, a lot of standards existed for mobile browsing, so to bring together these technologies, WAP forum was stormed in the same year. WAP forum began its work and by the year 2002, the forum was able to consolidate all the technologies. Finally WAP was born in 2002. Till now two versions of WAP has been released by the WAP forum. Now we use second version of WAP namely WAP 2.0. Though WAP was highly helpful and successful in bringing out a centralized mobile browser standard, the WML introduced by the WAP faces the criticism of highly deviating from basic HTML scripting.

It is possible to access the internet and web services from the mobile itself. Though many mobiles offer this service, efficient and more meaningful browsing can be carried out in the PDA’s (Personal Digital Assistance). This service is more known by the name Mobile Web. As the global Web standards are defined by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), the initiatives for Mobile Web was also started by the W3C in the name of W3C Mobile Web Initiative. Its aim was to make the mobile browsing more reliable and accessible. The mobile web service was first offered in the Nokia Communicator mobile at the year 1996 in Finland. As the data rates experienced in the mobile phones are far less then the one on the computer, it is more meaningful to use lightweight pages in mobile. For this purpose, XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) and WML (Wireless Markup Language) are used to design web pages for mobile browsing. But still it is not possible to include client side scripting in the mobiles. Also small size of the screen makes an adverse impact on mobile browsing. However the domain of web browsing is expected to boom in the 4G, as it moves towards IPv6 based communication.

Though mobiles were invented for voice communication, today some fellows use it mostly for messaging rather than voice communication! Messaging refers to the process of exchanging messages between two mobiles over the mobile network. There are two types of messaging services available in the mobile phones, namely SMS (Short Message Service) and MMS (Mail Message Service). SMS refers to the exchange of text messages. But in case of MMS along with the text it is possible to share multimedia objects like audio, video, images in the message. SMS messaging service was started first; it was introduced in the 2G by Motorola Corporation in the year 1989 in USA. It is also studied that text messaging is the most used mobile service around the world and 35% of the mobile phone users are actively indulged in messaging. Messaging service is used more extensively in Asian countries like Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, India, China rather than Western Countries. Basically messaging is used for entertainment and social networking purposes, but other than these messaging can also be used as a medium for advertising and service provider uses this service for passing various alerts to the user. But unlike other services, messaging is more vulnerable to spamming

PDA stands for Personal Digital Assistance. PDA is a hybrid communication device, which stands somewhere between computers and mobile phones. Most of the PDAs can access Wi-Fi’s WWAN’s (Wireless Wide Area Networks). The first ever PDA was introduced by Casio Corporation in the year 1983. Apple Inc introduced its first PDA in the year 1992, the name PDA was coined by Apple on the same year. The credit of introducing the PDA functionalities on mobile goes to Nokia, Nokia 9000- Communicator was the first ever PDA cum mobile phone. Generally PDA’s are designed with size compactness, usually they employ touch screen and are void of physical keyboard. Few models also employ an external keyboard with USB connectivity. Initially PDAs had serial ports for connectivity and then they employed IrDA (Infra Red Devices) devices for connectivity. Now the modern PDAs come with modern wireless connectivity devices like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth etc. PDAs with Bluetooth connectivity are increasingly gaining popularity among mobiles. The some PDAs also employ GPS (Global Positioning System); they are mostly useful for automobile drivers for real time automobile navigation. PDAs can also be synchronized with the personal computer so that the important data can be transferred to and from the PDA.

In the current era, voice transaction is not the only service expected from a mobile. User expects a lot of features and services. The complexity of mobile architecture and services offered by mobile phones has increased drastically to support them. People have started to move towards Smartphone and advanced mobile phones. The services offered by these mobile phones are huge such that they require an Operating System for running! The operating systems used by these mobile sets are known as Mobile OS. This Mobile OS makes the mobile phone to behave much as like a Personal Computer! Their task is to coordinate among the user and the available resources. A lot of Mobile OS are available in the current day market; few of the popular ones are iPhone OS, Blackberry OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian OS etc. iPhone OS and Blackberry OS were designed exclusively for iPhones and BlackBerry mobiles by the manufacturer itself. Symbian OS enjoys the largest share among the mobile OS; about 46.6% of mobiles use it. Recently Google has developed a Mobile OS named Android, which is gaining more popularity. However the major PC OS groups like Windows and Linux lag behind the others in the mobile OS domain and they are yet to capitalize the market!

Bluetooth is a wireless connectivity feature available in most of the modern mobiles. It enables two mobile phones to pair between themselves and exchange data between them without the help of mobile service provider. Bluetooth was invented by Jaap Haartsen for Ericson Mobiles in the year 1994. By the year 1998, a forum for Bluetooth has been stormed by the group of various mobile phone companies. Mobile phones have a transceiver (transmitter cum receiver) to support Bluetooth. In IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) forum Bluetooth is referred by the standard IEEE 802.16. Bluetooth is basically an ad-hoc (infrastructure less) wireless network. Three classes of Bluetooth standards are available based on its power consumption. Class two Bluetooth devices which consume 2.5mW with an approximate range of ten meters are used in mobile phones. Maximum data rate of three megabit per second is achievable using Bluetooth devices; however the Bluetooth devices on mobile can just offer data transmission rate of one megabit per second. Bluetooth technology can also be used by a mobile to connect with a personal computer for data transfer. The Bluetooth standard is now under improvement to enable the transmission of high quality audio and video at better data rates even in nigh traffic situations.

iPhone is a Smartphone introduced by Apple Inc. in the year 2007. It is the most popular and most sold Smartphone in the world. Till now about twenty two million units of iPhones have been sold all over the world. It is designed on “bar” form, with iPhone OS (developed by Apple exclusively for iPhones). It has a maximum of 32 GB flash memory with 128 MB DRAM. iPhone houses various connectivity devices like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPRS and EDGE. It has a 3.5 inch wide screen with two megapixel camera. Initially it is supposed that iPhone is to be developed by the joint effort of Apple and Motorola, but afterwards Motorola broke away and Apple took the full stake over the development. iPhone has a touch sensitive LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screen and it was the first mobile to introduce multi touch sensing screen. It runs on iPhone OS, which is a derivative of Darwin operating OS found in Mac OSX Leopard.  It supports audio conferencing and visual voice mailing, but it doesn’t support video calling. iPhone lacks an inbuilt keyboard and a virtual keyboard over the touch screen is present. iPhones almost have all the browsing capabilities, multimedia functionalities of a PC!