Says Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales to End Users Grew 8 Per Cent i. Egham, UK, February 23, 2010 View All Press Releases Combined Market Share of Top Five Mobile Phone Vendors Dropped More Than 4 Percentage Points in 2009 Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totalled 1.211 billion units in 2009, a 0.9 per cent decline from 2008, according to Gartner, Inc.
In the fourth quarter of 2009, the market registered a single-digit growth as mobile phone sales to end users surpassed 340 million units, an 8.3 per cent increase from the fourth quarter of 2008. "The mobile devices market finished on a very positive note, driven by growth in smartphones and low-end devices," said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartner. ”Smartphone sales to end users continued their strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2009, totalling 53.8 million units, up 41.1 per cent from the same period in 2008. In 2009, smartphone sales reached 172.4 million units, a 23.8 per cent increase from 2008. Table 1Worldwide Mobile Terminal Sales to End Users in 2009 (Thousands of Units) Device Fragmentation of Mobile Applications. It can take up to nine months to deploy an entertainment (mobile) application, But that's the duration of a cell phone in this market.
-Craig Hayman, IBM (source). Summary Fragmentation is the inability to "write once and run anywhere". This article analyzes various aspects of fragmentation of mobile applications (sometimes called device fragmentation), such as the reasons behind it, the current state-of-the-art in tackling it, and the directions we can expect it to evolve in the future. The article is intended for both practitioners and academics seeking a reasonably in-depth understanding of fragmentation in mobile applications. Introduction What is it? Causes of fragmentation Fragmentation stems from the diversity in OCs, which can be classified as follows: As we can see from the above, one OC can differ from another due to many factors. Why should we care? Fragmentation complicates all disciplines (disciplines as defined in the IBM Rational Unified Process) of a mobile software project.
Mobile Device Management Software - Mformation Technologies Inc. By Matt Bancroft TMCNet October 22, 2008… Many technology industries are dominated by a single supplier. While this can have both advantages and disadvantages, it is clear that the mobile device marketplace is not such an industry. Instead, the mobile device marketplace is fragmented and highly competitive. No single supplier dominates market share for either the mobile handsets themselves or for the operating systems on which they run. There are drawbacks to having a dominant supplier in a marketplace. The Microsoft Windows operating system is, perhaps, one of the most famous and well-known examples of a dominant technology solution in its category. Mobility is already one of the most fundamental technology innovations in history.
The diversity of handset suppliers is only half the story. Today’s mobile handset/operating system marketplace is a long way from the PC operating system marketplace. There are a number of mobile standards areas, each of which focuses on different challenges. A look at how device fragmentation influences J2ME application d. With an estimated 250 million Java-enabled handsets on the market today? A number projected to grow to 1 billion by 2006? The opportunity for wireless game developers is enormous. However, device fragmentation is the one major roadblock that could mean the difference between success and failure for developers embracing this market. Because of device fragmentation, J2ME game developers must develop code to address device-specific APIs, memory-management issues, performance differences, localization issues, screen-size variations, custom extensions, JVM implementation issues, as well as carrier-specific requirements.
As a result, device programmers spend more time manually porting applications to ensure they operate across a variety of devices and less time developing new games. This article provides an in-depth look at device fragmentation. Developers and publishers know this problem by the name fragmentation. Physical device characteristics Device OS characteristics and APIs JVM and APIs. The fragmentation effect. With the promise of a billion Java-enabled wireless handsets in the market by 2006 (according to Ovum Research), the opportunities to profit from the development and sale of J2ME applications may seem limitless. Limitless, that is, until you recognize that reaching that market requires the creation of hundreds of different versions of every application to satisfy multiple device-, language-, and operator-specific requirements.
Developers and publishers know this problem by the name fragmentation. Fragmentation is the evil twin of differentiation, a term marketing managers use to explain the need to create so many different handsets. Since people want their phones to look and perform differently and generally do not want to pay for features they won't use, handset manufacturers must offer devices to satisfy every possible taste. While differentiation may be good for handset marketers to increase sales, fragmentation is a major problem for developers. Physical device characteristics The JVM. Prosciutto Palermo Valley Mobile Sessions. Tackle Device Fragmentation with NetBeans and the NetBeans Mobil. Ince its inception, "write once, run anywhere! " has been the mantra and rallying cry for many architects and software engineers trying to convince their enterprises to move to or stay with Java. The phrase was particularly useful when talking about building software applications for mobile and wireless devices.
If you are involved in J2ME development, the write once, run anywhere or "WORA" battle cry may have lacked some luster in recent years. Sure it sounds good and logically makes sense. Defining Device Fragmentation Device fragmentation is the problem of having to write separate or custom software for devices on which you want your application to execute. What does the problem stem from? Device Spectrum In order to give those that have not had to address device fragmentation a taste of these issues, simply go to Sun's listing of J2ME supported devices.
'Write once, run anywhere' not working for phones. When it was first introduced, Sun Microsystems' Java software for cellular phones was supposed to let developers write a single program that could run on any handset. A half decade later, Sun's Java for cell phones, called the mobile information device profile, or MIDP, is used in half the world's 1.4 billion phones for downloading other bits of software. But writing a program that can run on any handset still isn't possible. It's an odd by-product of Java's success in the cell phone market. Ironing out the details of software such as the MIDP takes time, and neither the cell phone makers nor service providers have been willing to wait as they pump out the 700 million or so cell phones sold each year. Instead, Nokia, Motorola and other handset makers have built devices using their own fixes for MIDP. What was billed as an oasis for developers has turned into quicksand, quipped developers attending Sun's recent JavaOne confab in San Francisco.
Write Once, Deploy Anywhere. TaIke a look around you in just about any location – your office, walking down the street, the movies, even your own household – and it won’t take a marketing genius to tell you that if your application is useful to people on the go but hasn’t been ported to phones or PDAs, you’re missing a pretty large market, potentially millions of users. Of course, that same look around will tell you that your game or widget had better be able to work on mobile devices of all names and sizes, or you’ll cut out a large portion of your potential customer base. Sure, it sounds like a lot of work. But in this article, we’ll show you how to use the NetBeans Mobility Pack 5.5 for CLDC/MIDP to create a simple application suitable for cell phones and then deploy it to two very different devices.
Best of all, you’ll do it using only a single set of code instead of creating and managing a separate code base for each device. A brief overview of the Mobility Pack Creating a MIDlet Let’s look at the flow first. The fragmentation effect. With the promise of a billion Java-enabled wireless handsets in the market by 2006 (according to Ovum Research), the opportunities to profit from the development and sale of J2ME applications may seem limitless. Limitless, that is, until you recognize that reaching that market requires the creation of hundreds of different versions of every application to satisfy multiple device-, language-, and operator-specific requirements. Developers and publishers know this problem by the name fragmentation. Fragmentation is the evil twin of differentiation, a term marketing managers use to explain the need to create so many different handsets.
Since people want their phones to look and perform differently and generally do not want to pay for features they won't use, handset manufacturers must offer devices to satisfy every possible taste. While differentiation may be good for handset marketers to increase sales, fragmentation is a major problem for developers. Featured Resource Learn More The JVM. Mozilla Firefox. Archive » The Truth About Mobile Fragmentation. My most recent task has been architecting the Playtech mobile product, which currently encompasses 10 games running on over 600 devices in 8 languages, each heavily customised for multiple licensees. Furthermore, the system was designed to continue scaling across more than a hundred licensees, with dozens of games and languages, supporting all mass market devices, all managed by a small team of inter-disciplinary experts.
This has given me some interesting insights into the problems of fragmentation which I would like to share. The dominant UI model on the desktop has been the Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers system that became popular when Apple copied it from Xerox, and has stayed in the mainstream since Microsoft copied it from Apple. No such standardisation is present in the mobile handset world. Anyone who has ever attempted to develop software for mobile phones knows that there are many hidden pitfalls along the way.
However, mobile development need not be fraught with pain.