The mobile phone has influenced our modern day lives so much that we cannot even imagine a world without a multi function phone which is able to call people, sendf text messages, take pictures, record video, browse the internet, keep in touch with friends and function as an alarm clock to wake us up in the morning. Although we enjoy these features as standard in our current mobile phones, it took thousands of models for the mobile phone to evolve to this stage.

Mobile operating systems and device programming

At present the words Android and iPhone have become synonymous with mobile devices and mobile device applications. These two new mobile device operating systems (OS) have revolutionised the way we use mobile and handheld devices. A few years back the key player in mobile OS was Symbian, which we are familiar with, as it was used in most mobile phones in one form or another. Some of the other OS include: Microsoft Windows CE and Windows Mobile which were mainly used in personal digital assistants (PDAs) and smart phones; PalmOS which was used in the early Palm devices although the newer versions use Windows Mobile; Linux which was made popular by some of the first touch screen Motorola phones; and some other proprietary OS which were manufacturer specific.

Figure 3.8 Smart phones

With this myriad of OS being used by continuously evolving mobile devices with various specifications, the task of writing software applications for these phones became quite tedious and complicated.

Initially, each phone model had to be installed with limited software applications which were specifically written for that particular model. Most of these applications were written by "experts" for the Symbian platform. Writing applications for the Windows CE and Mobile platforms were comparatively easier as they used the .NET compact framework which is a scaled down version of the .NET framework used for windows based application development. However these applications, just like Symbian applications, were platform specific and required quite a bit of processing power which was only available in PDAs at the time. The solution to this problem was to introduce a cross-platform programming framework which will allow applications to run on any mobile device irrespective of the make, model or the OS.

The inclusion of Java or the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) into mobile devices revolutionised the mobile application development industry as it allowed programmers to write applications, for the first time, which were platform independent. The Java Micro Edition which is commonly known as J2ME or JME was introduced by Sun Micro Systems (presently Oracle) as a Free and Open Source (FOSS) framework for mobile application development. This technology quickly transformed the mobile application development industry and paved the way for all programmers, novice and expert alike, to build and share mobile applications which included everything from small standalone applications to games to Bluetooth applications to complex enterprise applications. Even at present J2ME is widely used for the development of integrated mobile applications which act as extensions of large scale enterprise solutions which include banking applications, stock market applications, online voting, online gambling, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Management Information Systems (MIS) to name a few.

With the rapid evolution of the mobile device over the past few years two major players have entered the market with the revolutionary and proprietary iPhone and the Open Source Android. These two OS have taken a different approach to mobile application development as they allow developers to develop applications using software tools and frameworks provided free of charge. This has sparked a second revolution in mobile application development.