So, here we are; I am in San Francisco, sitting on the first JavaOne organized by Oracle. It is actually organized together with the Oracle Develop and OracleWorld . The event is huge, occupying alll the major hotels around Moscone Center and Union Square. And of course, this means that there is an opportunity to
The first session that I am attending is by people from Nokia’s Institute of Technology in Brazil. They first start by explaining how SMS remains the main data connection for most users in the world, with a few figures: 3.9 billion SMS users projected by 2013, and also, usage rate increasing between 2007 and 2009 from 51% to 59% in Brazil.
The session is actually about a Java ME application called Mobile Deck, which provides a nice user interface to SMS applications. By combining use of Wireless Messaging API with LWUIT (Lightweifht User Interface Toolkit), they managed to provide a high-level interface to SMS interactions. The user can use a graphical user interface, with icons and other gimmicks, to select the SMS services that they like.
This is definitely better in terms of user experience than a simple SMS service, where the user needs to encode the request in a text SMS. In addition, using such services allows them to compact the information, and to add security features such as encryption for sensitive content (because a binary SMS is used, and then decoded by the applicatoin on behalf of the user.
Seems to work, as well. This application comes preinstalled on Nokia phones in Brazil, and they have an 25% activation rate. In addition, many people buy services from the application, some times on one shot, and in some cases, through a subscription.
The limit on this is that it simply provides a “sales’ front-end to traditional SMS services, and it does not introduce any innovative SMS-based application. I guess that I’ll have to keep looking for these.
Now, a final note from the evaluator: like most applications we have seen, thess guys have been adding useless complexity on their application. On the largest code snippet they have shown, they get the content of a binary SMS in a byte array, then transform it into a Hex string, and send that to the decoding method. This means that they quite lilkely to allocate many strings in that process.
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