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From a push and talk device to a reliable communication partner that doubles up as a personal assistant-cum-infotainment source, mobiles have come a long way. Today the “road warriors” or enterprise employees are mostly hooked onto smart phones – devices that integrate the functionality of a mobile phone and a personal digital assistant (PDA).

It has been found that smart phone users consume more mobile content than the average mobile phone user. The smart phone owners are not using them exclusively for productivity applications, but are also using them to view mobile video, play mobile games, and listen to music in addition to using them for personal e-mail and wireless Web access. It's no surprise then that the smart phone makers are sharply focused on enabling content delivery to the consumer while expanding storage, screen size, security, and battery life.

A smart phone's hardware components usually include a microprocessor, a mainboard, an antenna, ROM, RAM, a battery, additional storage such as flash memory or an SD (secure digital) card, network interfaces, and an LCD or a TFT (thin-film transistor) screen, and sometimes a tiny hard disk.

Power Consumed by the Components in a Mobile Handset

According to the In-Stat survey, smart phones still fall short of fulfilling mobile business users' expectations. Nearly half of those surveyed said they were unsatisfied with smart phones' small keyboards. Other issues included a lack of applications, navigation difficulties, and short battery life.
The obvious factors that will set the smart phone apart from the handheld computers are: faster processors, more memory, higher-resolution screens, and different experiments with data input methods, not to mention support for more wireless communication standards.
Addressing these core factors is a challenge before both handset manufacturers and chip manufacturers.

Size Matters
The question “can you really read something like an Excel presentation or financial reports effectively on a smart phone screen, isn't it too small?” is one that most mobile enterprise users are familiar with. According to the In-Stat survey, 43% of the users cited small screens as a problem.
Significantly, size has a great deal to do with user acceptance of a device as a phone. The screen tends to make handheld devices bigger, and in the phone market small is considered beautiful. If size goes a long way to defining the smart phone, the larger handheld computer gives advantages to certain types of businesses or employees.

Smart phone screen displays are designed to facilitate various applications including Web surfing, email, and audio and video playback. Screen sizes range from 2.2 inches (5.588 cm) to 10 inches (25.4 cm). Screen resolution continues to improve-some smart phones have QVGA (320 × 240) or VGA (640 × 480) displays with more than 64,000 colors. Compare this with a PDA that has a standard screen size of 4 inches and Ultra-Mobile PC having 7 inches, with resolutions from QVGA (240 x 320 pixels) to (800 x 480) or larger for a Ultra-Mobile PC. The Web page design therefore needs to be able to adapt to different sizes and shapes of screens. While it is possible to create Web pages for specific devices, a reasonable minimum screen size to aim for with general Web site design is 320 x 240 pixels (known as one Quarter VGA or QVGA).

According to Chakrapani GK, country general manager, Enterprise Solutions, Nokia India, the attempt is to give the smart phone user the comfort of a mobile computing device. “Screen size is one area where vendors are looking to match the computing power and high-resolution screen experience of a handheld device.”

With a handheld, the screens are often large and sometimes can be rotated between portrait and landscape. “On a smart phone, the larger, more sophisticated screens mean they can also have touch-screen capability or drop-down lists, signature capture, and so on,” adds Chakrapani.
At Philips and Lucent Bell Labs, researchers are developing a flexible display that users can roll up and even fold, which could lead to some interesting mobile device displays.

Adding Power Intelligence
Foremost concern for the researchers has been to address the important issue of smart phone power efficiency. Smart phones typically use three types of cell phone batteries: NiMH (nickel metal hydride), Li-ion (lithium-ion), and Li-polymer-all of which support a few hours of talk time and a week of standby time.

The technology behind mobile energy management involves a combination of CPU capabilities, system software, middleware, and operating system. The essential dynamics that drain the power are larger touch-pad displays, multimedia capabilities, dedicated WAN modem chips, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi network interfaces, and more RAM and flash for downloadable applications create a higher hardware bill-of-materials (BOM) and draw more power.

“Unlike a computing handheld device, a smart phone has to be always on. This requires intelligent power management so that these applications are available all the time, but when not in use the system must 'intelligently' go in to 'sleep mode' or 'Deep sleep mode' or even 'ultra deep sleep mode' thus saving battery power,” says M. Harish, general manager, Business Development, Texas Instrument.

Today's high-end mobile devices come with modest CPU specs, with clocks in the 200- to 500-MHz range. As such, mobile CPUs consume a quarter or less of the total energy budget, with the display and backlight eating up a big slice of the energy budget pie. (Refer Fig 1)

“However, battery technology is not advancing as rapidly as semiconductor technology. Power management is not only a handset manufacturer issue, but also a concern for the chip designers,” Harish notes. The chipmakers are therefore concentrating on building processors using latest silicon technology; 90nm chips currently reside in most high-end smart phones. “The challenge is to bring 65nm and soon 45nm processors for the handsets that will have various low voltage levels and integrate intelligent power management,” says Harish.

Processors for smart phones include ARM ­(advanced RISC machine), Motorola Dragon Ball, MIPS, and TI OMAP. Intel licensed ARM technology and uses it in its XScale lines. The XScale architecture leverages Dynamic Voltage Management (DVM) technology, which lets the processor's operating voltage and frequency scale dynamically in response to varying computing and communication needs. Usually these processors run at several hundred megahertz. Intel's researchers have demonstrated 1-GHz mobile processors. In addition to increasingly high speeds, another trend is the use of SoC (system on a chip) technology, which lets a processor incorporate a set of distinct functionalities in the same package.

Fuel cell batteries and other new battery technologies for mobile devices have emerged, especially in Japan, but aren't in mass production yet. According to some industry analysts, Linux operating system has made great strides in the smart phone arena, and promising to be more power efficient than Symbian OS-based handsets. Just as with modern servers, and increasingly with high-performance desktops, multi-core processors will find their way into handsets. Early last year, ARM demonstrated dual- and quad-CPU versions of the ARM11 architecture, with real-world deployments expected to begin later this year.

Smart Phone May Kill the iPod!
As convergence is fast becoming the flavor of the day, smart phones are evolving from mere communication lifelines to a compact digital office that fits snuggly in your pocket. Newer smart phones are being fashioned to allow larger room for storing image, video, and music files.

Expect an onslaught of mobile phones using hard disk drives as manufacturers continue to pack in memory-hungry functions and features into handsets. Cornice, a US-based maker of mini-hard drives used in portable music players and mobiles reckons that the mobile phone disk drive market will explode at a compound annual growth rate of 325% between 2004 and 2009.

Smart phone operating systems and applications are comparatively smaller than their desktop counterparts. So, it's possible and highly desirable to put all system and application code into RAM, ROM, or flash memory. Many smart phones have 64 to 128 MB of SRAM for application code, 128 to 256 MB of flash memory for system code, and more than 128 MB of flash memory for user data. One can even use flash memory for external removable data storage-for example, SmartMedia, CF (compact flash), MMCs (multimedia memory cards), and SD (each of these refers to an industry standard supported by a number of companies). CF memory cards can supply as much as 4 GB of storage capacity. Then again, some smart phones are starting to offer Gigabit hard disks.

Samsung came up with the world's first 8GB hard disk embedded smart phone, the SGH-i310. Might as well, forget your iPod at home, as it offers an envious capacity of storing around 2,000 songs (4MB each). Nokia N91 comes a distant close with an integrated 4GB hard drive with a storage capacity of 3,000 songs for up to 12.5 hours.

Securing the Front-line
Security in the context of a mobile phone means different things to different people. The consumer perceives it only at the physical level, ensuring that the phone cannot be stolen or hacked into. For the enterprise user, security issues may have more to do with concealing the contents from prying eyes; while for the supplier of mobile media content security is about ensuring that only the device belonging to the person who has licensed the content can display or play it.

Early this year, a study showed that most companies discourage distributing smart phones to workers because of security worries. According to Symantec, the number of mobile malware has grown by more than 200% in the last six months. Security companies spot more than that number of PC-aimed viruses, worms, and Trojans each month.

The survey suggested that that until mobile security is addressed, the enterprises will avoid mobile computing. In part, that's because enterprise administrators believe that an attack on a mobile endpoint are more likely than on their fixed-line infrastructure. Virus attacks and hacking attempts are both more likely via a ­mobile network, they say.

As a result, several third-party security solution providers are being sought after. F-Secure is one leading name in this domain. Patrik Runald, senior security specialist, F-Secure Corporation says, “At present, mobile antivirus is typically offered as a value-added service, which results in a fairly low take-up rate. In order to gain increased security level, operators are slowly introducing packages where antivirus is bundled as an integral part of a larger offering.”

F-Secure claims there are over 317 known viruses for mobile phones. Patrik notes that since this is a significantly low number compared to 200,000 PC-based virus and worms, the majority of smart phone users are not used to seeking software to their phones from the operator's portals. “In order to efficiently protect the handsets, an anti-virus product should be running on a large portion of smartphones. Therefore, a lot of operators in Europe have already started to require an anti-virus application to be pre-installed on the device when it is shipping from the manufacturer,” he adds.
F-Secure Mobile Anti-Virus has a patented mechanism for pushing updates (virus fingerprints) in an SMS message in urgent cases. For less critical updates, it relies on packet data connections. When the user reads the email, for example, the application detects the data connection and checks for updates. Patrik adds, “We also have a full solution complete with a server backend system for mobile operators where they can easily provide security solutions to their end-users as part of their mobile contract.”

Nokia is preloading its Series 60 and Symbian OS-based mobile devices with Symantec's mobile security solutions, offering increased protection for consumer and business users against mobile malware threats. The AutoProtect feature runs continuously in the background, watching for malicious code in SMS, EMS, MMS, HTTP, and email files. Users can also manually scan applications and file archives.

However, software solutions can be vulnerable, as the data defining a phone's security key can be copied or overwritten and the security software can be tampered with. To provide the highest level of trust, hardware solution, which locks the security keys and cryptographic algorithms, is required. One company which is working within the Symbian ecosystem to provide the tools for implementing hardware-based security is Discretix Inc. The company is focusing on how to make standard cryptographic hardware efficient.

The security blanket is small and selective as of now. But it is anticipated that once the number of smart phone owners who use e-payment services, and who use their phones to access such services, reach a critical mass, this will undoubtedly motivate cyber criminals to start actively targeting smart phone users as a source of potential profit. After all, security system is as strong as its weakest link.

The Big Picture
Thanks to the foresight, both the industry and academic research communities are working to resolve numerous issues, ranging from low-power hardware design to enhanced user interface to widened storage capacity to mobile security issues. The success of smart phone over other competing handheld devices relies on the level of advanced technology taken up in all the above areas. These will combine to lead to next-generation agile smart phones as multifunctional powerhouses of content.

Malovika Rao

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