MIT students dial up ways to make mobile phones specialized
By Hilary Powell
How would you like your phone to buzz about a sale at that store you just passed?
For creating an innovative application with Google Inc.’s upcoming free and open mobile operating system, Android, four MIT students recently won a prize in the Google-sponsored Android Developer Challenge to create software that tests the power of open phone systems.
Yahoo! news featured an article Monday about a class project 20 students were given to design a software program for cell phones that uses Google Inc.’s upcoming Android mobile operating system. According to the article, the students tested ways to make cell phones act differently according to location. In a way, they tried to endow cell phones with a kind of conscience:
“One project named GeoLife gives users a way to set to-do lists and get reminders on their phones. Walk by the market, and the device might buzz with a message that you’re supposed to pick up milk. Then there was Locale, which lets users configure their phones to automatically adjust their settings when the devices detect themselves in certain zones. So you might set your phone to automatically go into vibrate mode in the office and silent mode at the movie theater, and ring everywhere else.”
Other applications that made it into the top 50 include a program that discovers pricing and other data for any product with a barcode by scanning the code with a cell phone camera, a tool that allows users to navigate and record a route using images instead of maps and a niche innovation that gives golfers real-time, location-specific information, such as the weather and game statistics.
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