Why choose MDB to develop your mobile application?

Why choose MDB? Why choose MDB to develop your mobile application?

Windows Mobile development is technically challenging and requires specialist knowledge. Our experience of embedded development pre-dates Microsoft’s .NET Compact Framework and we have an excellent track record of producing successful products.

Windows Mobile Challenges

On desktop PC's, end-users are accustomed to rich, responsive user interfaces, and naturally expect the same on PDA's.

An average, modern PC might have a specification similar to the following:

• CPU:  2 GHz Dual Core.
• RAM:  2 Gigabytes (2048 Megabyte) DDR2
• Storage: 250 Gigabyte Hard Disk

  By comparison, a typical Windows Mobile 5/6 PDA specification is: -

• CPU  400 MHz Single Core.
• RAM  64 Megabyte
• Storage 128 Megabyte internal, plus 1 Gigabyte SD Card.

This is a vastly simplified view as a modern PC has completely different system architecture. Things such as bus speeds, floating point units (FPU's), and multi-core processors are all contributing factors to the massive performance difference.

Mobile devices must also concern themselves with battery life and their processors often ‘scale-down’ the speed of the CPU to increase running time.

Many factors, that don’t apply to PC applications, must also be considered. An example of just a few are: -

• The PDA could be switched off or go into standby in the middle of using the application.
• A user could remove a storage card while it’s in use.
• An Internet connection might not be available, or may be intermittent and very slow.

Meeting the challenges of Mobile Development

Delivering products that meet user’s expectations on a platform with such limiting constraints is the most challenging aspect of mobile development. Code that runs almost instantaneously on a desktop PC is often too slow to be usable on a PDA.

Having had numerous years mobile development experience we are fully aware of the many limitations and idiosyncrasies; furthermore we have tried and tested techniques to counter most of these issues.

Experience

We have wide ranging knowledge of most aspects of Windows Mobile development. Some areas of particular interest include:

• Vendor specific API’ knowledge, particularly Symbol-Motorola, allowing usage of device specific hardware such as barcode scanners, RFID tags etc…
• Windows Mobile 5/6 additional feature usage.
• Multi-threaded UI development to improve responsiveness.
• Off-line capabilities.
• Handling of intermittent network connections.
• Custom data synchronisation techniques
• TomTom Navigator API and integration.
• SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition optimisation techniques.