| Serving Media |
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Of the three core objectives the task of delivering media to mobile devices has been the most challenging and we have been unable to come to any definite conclusions. Mobile telephone hardware technology is changing rapidly, with processing power increasing exponentially and functionality added frequently; hi-res digital cameras, MP3 players and so forth are now fairly common. However common standards, whilst they are slowly being adopted, are by no means widespread. In many ways the situation with mobile telephone technology is similar to the mid nineties and desk-top computers: widely varying degrees of performance and functionality, mixed adoption of web standards and slow, expensive connections to the internet. As a consequence much software development work for mobile telephones is device specific and concentrates on client-side applications. For the purposes of this project we have assumed a basic mobile telephone specification and have designed the system around web standards. Most phones now come with some sort of web browser that supports WAP, many also support XHTML. A range of media types are generally supported by mobile phones. We have included these in the specification, with media files embedded in web pages as with basic web development practice. 3rd party controllers are available for all these file types:
This means that the art work media can be hosted on a standard web server, either one owned by the system administration body, or by the artist. Content creation by artists will require widely understood web design and development methodologies, with minor accommodations for the limitations of mobile telephones – small screen size, narrow bandwidth. We have excluded client side applications from the scope of the project as they are so device specific. However, Flash and Java content are usable on high end phones; the embedding of these objects in web pages is consequently supported. The system design also makes provision for MMS and SMS media output. |