Poping Corn With Mobile Phones

Google Tech Talks June 14, 2008 ABSTRACT Jerry will talk about scaling Google Maps from the desktop down to mobile phones where usage is growing rapidly and will someday surpass desktop usage. He will discuss the approaches used in adapt- ing the application to work in a low bandwidth, high latency environment with a wide variety of net- works and devices. Mobile data rates currently range from 100 Kbps to 2 Mbps but more significantly, HTTP network request latency is measured in seconds. Mobile phone screens are very small compared to laptops, so we can’t just shrink down the view. User input is often limited to 12-key keypads plus two soft keys, sometimes augmented with an alpha keyboard and/or a touch screen. The key adaptation was reimplementing the AJAX web site as a client-server application, ported to several mobile platforms. We redesigned the user interface for the narrow UI bottleneck and added cel- lular-based location detection so people don’t have to type an address just to get the map open to the right page. An application-specific network protocol and tile cache help with the high latency network by multiplexing requests together into fewer round trips. A special “mobile” tile set helps with latency and bandwidth by downloading smaller map tiles while offering more frequent road labels to suit tiny screens. Compression techniques such as a compact-header JPEG format for satellite images also help. The server is stateless so scaling up capacity is mostly …

Interview with the creators of “Dialtones: A Telesymphony”. “Dialtones” (2001-2002: Golan Levin, Scott Gibbons, Gregory Shakar, Yasmin Sohrawardy et al.) is a large-scale concert performance whose sounds are wholly produced through the carefully choreographed ringing of the audience’s own mobile phones. Before the concert, participants register their mobile phone numbers at a series of web terminals; in exchange, new ringtone melodies are automatically transmitted to their phones, and their seating assignment tickets are generated. During the concert, the audience’s phones are dialed up by live performers, using custom software which permits as many as 60 phones to ring simultaneously. Because the exact location and tone of each participant’s mobile phone is known in advance, the Dialtones concert is able to present a diverse range of unprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting structures, such as waves of polyphony which cascade across the audience.

www.tech2.com?ref=ia This mobile phone prototype has a 5-inch display that wraps around the phone and has a long battery life that is way beyond normal phones.