Assignment 2

As I was reading the assignment for this week and exploring various mobile applications, I came to realize that my favorite application on mobiles ties in completely with the Midlet I thought of creating. One of the most useful capabilities mobiles offer me is sms. The reasons are fairly simple, they basically revolve around efficient, easy, and fast communication. While it isn't considered an innovative form of communication, it nonetheless, remains a vital one, since we are talking about point to point communication with little distortion to the content and meaning of the text itself. Unlike email it lacks the formality of writing a letter, and functions more along the lines of IM's. This is extremely useful because it allows for a larger flow of communication to occur. There are instances when the content of your communication cannot be more efficiently transmitted by any other means other than a text message. In addition, a user can communicate through sms even when experiencing problematic service, mainly because a message can be sent even with very low signal, whereas during a phone call the signal can tune in and out, dropped calls might occur, or even the voice signal altogether might not be transmitted at all. These are the primary reasons why the elitist European markets have endorsed sms technology fully.

Old generation cell phones offered sms applications but were not in the position to offer space for storing old messages. New generation cell phones have solved this problem by having increased memory. However through my interaction with them they present a new one, and that lies in the area of organization. Indeed new generation mobiles are capable of storing a large amount of text messages but make it difficult to navigate through such excess stored material. Thus, it almost defies the purpose of storage, for if you cannot access the information you wish to have stored in an efficient manner, such an advancement could prove overwhelming to the average user. The Midlet I propose offers a solution to this organizational problem. It would be implemented as an added feature expanding the sms interface and capability. The Midlet would function as follows: it would direct messages to particular folders that would be instantly created based on the list of contacts present in your phone book. In other words if a message was received by a number that exists in your contact list, the message would be stored automatically in the folder labeled by that name. If it was the first time an existing contact text messaged you a new folder would be instantly created under that name. From the moment a folder is created, messages from particular contacts would be grouped together. In addition these folders would be in position to store your saved replies. In these folders, conversations would be stored, quite similar to a gmail thread. This would allow for easy and efficient navigation.

The proposed Midlet would also offer a search feature with multiple filters (such as: time, date, name etc.) allowing even greater access to stored information. Finally, the novelty of this Midlet would be to link it to the mobile's phone book or any place a contact's name would appear. In essence, this Midlet would work in a complimentary manner to how the Mobile's phone book functions today.