Chapter 9
Accessing the Device
What's In This Chapter:
- Understanding the common hardware on the devices
- Using input sensors
- Playing multimedia files within applications
Smartphones and tablets include a lot of sensors and information. You can enhance the capabilities of today's applications to include a personalized experience. Today's devices can detect where users are, their velocity of travel, and the contact closest to their current location. The devices include multiple types of messaging tools such as voicemail, text messaging (SMS/MMS), instant messengers such as Skype, video conferencing with FaceTime, and raw TCP/IP communication using WiFi or cellular data networks. Application developers can count on their users having sophisticated hardware in their hands. This chapter explores how to access and use the ever-advancing hardware and software capabilities of today's smartphones.
The mobile application ecosystems have produced many creative apps today. Dropbox and a dozen other cloud storage services have created applications for viewing, editing, and syncing your documents between PCs and mobile computing devices. Services such as Evernote have sprung up to give users seamless integration of digital artifacts from brainstorming to note-taking sessions. Urbanspoon and other information delivery apps leverage location data to present prefiltered data based on location. Dragon Dictation and other voice recognition applications use a user's contacts to more accurately interpret ...
