Quickly produce efficient, reliable, cross platform context-aware mobile applications that are tuned for the mobile computing environment.

The Mobile Platform Software Development Kit 1.3 (Mobile Platform SDK) a free, open source project, covered by BSD License, simplifies the task of adapting an application for use in a mobile environment. It provides a set of libraries and runtime components, along with a programming interface that is common across supported platforms and runtimes, for Windows and Linux, and Moblin. The Mobile Platform SDK 1.3 enables developers to quickly and efficiently deliver applications with mobility features while maximizing code reuse. 

Close the gap between software functionality and mobile device platforms

Mobile users expect business applications to adjust automatically to resource-constrained mobile environments. With the Mobile Platform SDK 1.3, your software can integrate mobile features that meet user expectations for computing anytime and anywhere:

• Manage connectivity transparently. Users can focus on their tasks rather than managing network connections.
• Effectively balance power and performance. Users can get aware of and utilize the available battery life.
• Work across multiple platforms. Users can access applications on the device of their choice, taking advantage of device capabilities.
• Use available memory and disk space for local data store and synchronization. Applications developed with the Mobile Platform SDK 1.3 can discover and utilize available memory and disk storage for caching, local data store, and synchronization.
• Adapt to different display types. Mobile devices are often connected to different display types. Applications based on the Mobile Platform SDK 1.3 can discover the attached display type and adapt to it.
• Manage network bandwidth. Control the bandwidth of network traffic in system, application, process and socket level.

Developers face significant challenges when integrating or extending mobile features. Some of these include:

• Creating applications that are aware of platform context and resources in order to efficiently take advantage of mobile platforms
• Developing cross-platform, cross-runtime solutions for application deployment across multiple clients

Creating code that is aware of platform context means your applications can more efficiently adapt to user settings as well as environmental and platform changes.

The following figure shows how the Mobile Platform SDK 1.3 straddles several different functional layers to provide better integration between applications and mobile hardware.

The Mobile Platform SDK integrates with different mobile client layers

For example, the following figure shows how a virus scanner application could be optimized for available power connections, maintaining full operations when connected, but suspending background scans when running on batteries.

Virus scanner application optimized for power, bandwidth, and connectivity

The Mobile Platform SDK 1.3 has a common programming interface, meaning object models, naming conventions, and parameters are consistent across programming languages to minimize code differences across platforms. This interface allows applications to be deployed natively on different platforms without extensive recoding.

The common programming interface and model is consistent across all supported languages and platforms. This programming model includes:

• Classes, Instances, Properties, and Methods – To represent devices and system contexts. The devices are Battery, Platform, Processor, Network Adapter, Link Protocol, Display Adapter, Physical Disk, Logical Disk, Memory, RFID, etc. The contexts include Power, Connectivity, Display, Storage, and Bandwidth.
• Events and Threshold notifications – Runtime components monitor system events and inform applications when an event occurs. For example, an application can register to be informed when the system goes on battery power. When this occurs, the runtime component executes a callback routine to notify the application in real time. You can then program the application to go into a power-optimized mode to conserve power when the system goes on battery power. Event notification may be tied to a threshold, such as when the battery is reduced to 50%.
• Collections and enumerations – Discover all devices and allow enumeration of a collection of multiple instances of a device on the system.

A GUI-based tool that helps you utilize, key features such as:

• Enumerating devices on a system and viewing their properties
• Registering for event notification
• Viewing event reports

The Mobile Information Viewer validates specific implementations of the Mobile Platform SDK 1.3 features.

A standalone client application that allows you to create, view, and manage bandwidth usage policies on client systems.

The Mobile Platform SDK 1.3 contains a set of APIs for mobile software development and several GUI tools that can be used to view and manage resources on mobile platforms. The following devices and contexts are supported by the Mobile Platform SDK:

• Uniform programming interface support for code written in C++, Java*, and .NET*.
• Support for Microsoft Windows XP*, Windows Vista* Business, Windows Mobile for PocketPC 2003, Windows Mobile for Smartphone 2003, Windows Mobile 5.0 PPC and Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone operating systems.
• Support for Linux Ubuntu 7.10 for Notebooks
• Support for Moblin UME on UMPC and Atom-based devices
• Remain the compatible interface (C++, Java*, and .NET*) for Mobile Platform SDK 1.1 for Windows

The following changes have been made in Mobile Platform SDK 1.3 open source project:

• RFID/GPRS/CDMA only have the client interface, no corresponding providers are supported in this open source project
• Additional development environment are supported, including Microsoft Visual Studio* 2005, and .NET Framework 2.0.
• The package includes the Mobile Platform Provider Development Kit, which enables you to develop plug-in modules for your own devices.
• Improved the performance by avoiding the multiple mobile servers co-existing in the system
• Supports linkage with different C runtime libraries, not only the dynamically loadable libraries (/MD and /MDd compiler options), but also the static libraries (/MT and /MTd compiler options).
• Detection of Virtualization Technology is supported.
• Detection of Intel® Centrino® processor technology is supported.