GVSU Mobile Applications and Services Lab

Last week, we learned that Apple would be revamping some US retail stores, including a new iPod touch-based point-of-sale (POS) system. A new scanner accessory allows Apple to replace the old Windows CE-based sales handhelds.

With the introduction of Android version 1.6, support was added different screen sizes.  The platform does a nice job of letting developers tell the market what size screens their app supports, but that’s only half the story.

This means that every game will have to support 6 unique screen configurations in order to look its best on every phone!

A Survey of Platforms for Mobile Networks Research

Auditory contexts are recognized from mixtures of sounds from mobile users’ everyday environments. We describe our implementation of auditory context recognition for mobile devices. In our system we use a set of support vector machine classifiers to implement the recognizer. Moreover, static and runtime resource consumption of the system are measured and reported.

"I think you get a bit of an insight into the psychology of the different users of social networks.

Anyhoo, more interestingly, mobile search is booming, with 32% of searchers with internet-capable cellphones now searching for local business information, an 11% increase from 2008. Some 60% of smartphone owners search either via their on-board browsers or via applications, and you can bet most of those will be iPhone users.

The study also shows that the most popular local content categories searched on mobile are directories (42%), maps (41%), restaurants (37%) and movies (30%).

In this article we ‘ll review the present state of the market, the key App Store building blocks and where will the market be heading in two years.

And while technical openness was established 7 years ago, what was lacking all these years was commercial openness; the funnel between external developers and in-market handsets was so thin that very few software players could pass through. It took Symbian six years to reach 10,000 applications, while it took Apple only 6 months (see our earlier analysis). In the first year of operation, Apple’s App Store brought in 65,000+ apps, 100,000 registered developers, 1.5Billion application downloads and availability to consumers across 77 countries through 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch devices sold.

n this historical context, it is easy to see that App Stores are a developer-to-consumer merchandising channel; a go-to-market vehicle for allowing consumers to distribute and retail their applications directly to the end-consumers, while taking out the middlemen from distribution and retailing.

Shares of GPS device makers Garmin and TomTom plummeted today through a combination of their quarterly results and the launch of Google Maps Navigation.

With the DROID, the company has perhaps created its most attractive and intriguing piece of technology yet.

The DROID is an odd and beautiful device.

Throughout our tests, we were consistently impressed with the tightness and speed of navigation on the phone. The DROID makes Android feel modern the way the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre are -- like machines designed for a pace of life that's increasingly more Twitter and less USPS.

People have long shared product opinions with friends and family through word-of-mouth. Today, social media tools enable consumers to extend their connections and conduct commerce in powerful new ways.

Social network users are a highly coveted group of consumers. Across all age brackets, they were more likely than average to make an online purchase, according to a May 2009 survey by Anderson Analytics. What’s more, social network users are sharing recommendations with greater frequency than generally expected. A Q1 2009 Razorfish survey of social network users found that some 29% reported sharing their views online at least every few weeks, while 10% said they made such contributions at least every few days.

And, without further ado, we bring you the Droid vs. iPhone vs. Palm Pre vs. MyTouch 3G …

Howto: Set up an Android Dev Phone Without a SIM Card

More and more companies are creating iPhone applications as a way to reinforce branding and to gain new customers. Some companies are even seeing increased sales thanks to iPhone apps. One of those is the Pizza Hut app [iTunes link] for the iPhone and iPod touch, which has now generated more than $1 million in sales according to MobileMarketer. The US-only iPhone app was first introduced three months ago.

if you are looking for barcode iPhone apps that work, here are 5 apps you should try:

The Android UI team has begun developing guidelines for the interaction and visual design of Android applications. Look here for articles that describe these guidelines as we release them.