Mobile Software for internet

Speaking of mobile browsers, their small screens raise the issues of multimodal
user interfaces and personalization. With the General Packet Radio Service
or ‘‘GPRS,’’ rolled out across the world in late 2001, it became possible for
a mobile user to simultaneously speak and listen in a voice connection while
using text screens delivered via a Web connection. As an engineer, you’ll have
to decide when it makes sense to talk to the user, listen to the user, print out a
screen of options to the user, and ask the user to highlight and click to choose
from that screen of options. For example, when booking an airline flight it is
much more convenient to speak the departure and arrival cities than to choose
from a menu of thousands of airports worldwide. But if there are ten options
for making the connection you don’t want to wait for the computer to read
out those ten and you don’t want to have to hold all the facts about those ten
options in your mind. It would be more convenient for the travel service to
send you a Web page with the ten options printed and scrollable.

On the personalization front, consider the corporate ‘‘knowledge sharing’’ or
‘‘knowledge management’’ system. Initially, workers are happy simply to have
this kind of system in place. But after a few years, the system becomes so filled
with that it is dificult to find anything relevant. Given an organization in
which 1,000 documents are generated every day, wouldn’t it be nice to have a
computer system smart enough to figure out which three are likely to be most
interesting to you? And display the titles on the three lines of your phone’s
display?

A more interesting challenge is presented by asking the question, ‘‘Can a
computer help me be all that I can be?’’ Engineers often build things that are
easy to engineer. Fifty years after the development of television, we started
building high-definition television (HDTV). Could engineers build a higher
resolution standard? Absolutely. Did consumers care? So far it seems that not
too many do care.