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8 Types OF Mobile Content
Business Research Methods (DMS 502)
University of Nairobi
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TYPES OF MOBILE CONTENT
Mobile content takes many shapes. Strictly speaking, mobile content is any form of media (pictures, music, text, videos) that can be used on a mobile device, such as a cell phone or tablet.
The demand for mobile content will continue to grow as more mobile devices arrive in the market. Devices like the iPhone, iPad and Android devices have changed how consumers consume content. Improvements in device speeds have also contributed to an increase in demand for mobile content.
Apps
Mobile app development is the act or process by which a mobile app is developed for mobile devices, such as personal digital assistants, enterprise digital assistants or mobile phones. These applications can be pre-installed on phones during manufacturing platforms, or delivered as web applications using server-side or client-side processing to provide an "application-like" experience within a Web browser.
Mobile application development, also known as mobile apps, has become a significant mobile content market since the release of the first iPhone from Apple in 2007.
The bundling of the iPhone with an app store, as well as the iPhone's unique design and user interface, helped bring a large surge in mobile application use. It also enabled additional competition from other players. For example, Google's Android platform for mobile content has further increased the amount of app content available to mobile phone subscribers.
Some examples of mobile apps would be applications to manage travel schedules, buy movie tickets, preview video content, read digital version of popular newspapers, identify music, look at star constellations, view Wikipedia, and much more.
Types of apps
Native apps Such apps are developed for a single mobile operating system exclusively, therefore they are “native” for a particular platform or device. App built for systems like iOS, Android, Windows phone, Symbian, Blackberry cannot be used on a platform other than their own. In other words, you won’t be able to use Android app on iPhone.
Hybrid apps They are built using multi-platform web technologies (for example HTML5, CSS and JavaScript). So-called hybrid apps are mainly website applications disguised in a native wrapper. Hybrid multi-platform apps are fast and relatively easy to develop.
Web apps Web apps use a browser to run and are usually written in HTML5, JavaScript or CSS. These apps redirect a user to URL and offer “install” option by simply creating a bookmark to their page. Web applications require minimum of device memory, as a rule. As all personal databases are saved on a server, users can get access from any device whenever there is internet connection. That is why the use of web apps with poor connection would result in bad user experience.
Categories of apps
This clearly indicates what purposes people are using mobile apps for. They tend to do business,
communicate, entertain and play games, educate themselves, and relax, of course.
Gaming apps Mobile gaming has always been thriving, prompting app developers to invest more time and resources into creating new games and mobile versions of well-known stationary games. From
Travel apps Travel apps’ purpose is to make your traveling easier, more comfortable, fun and informative. Some of them turn your smartphone into universal travel diary, some can literally guide you through the unknown sites abroad using maps, some provide translation assistance. That’s why most of today’s tourists seem to be digitally-savvy all-knowing travelers.
Images Mobile images are used as the wallpaper to a mobile phone, and are also available as screensavers. On some handsets, images can also be set to display when a particular person calls the users.
Music Mobile music is any audio file that is played on a mobile phone. Mobile music is normally formatted as an AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) file or an MP3, and comes in several different formats. Monophonic ringtones were the earliest form of ringtone, and played one tone at a time. This was improved upon with polyphonic ringtones, which played several tones at the same time so a more convincing melody could be created. The next step was to play clips of actual songs, which were dubbed Real tones. These are preferred by record labels as this evolution of the ringtone has allowed them to gain a cut of lucrative ringtone market. In short Realtones generate royalties for record labels (the master recording owners) as well as publishers (the writers), however, when Monophonic or Polyphonic ringtones are sold only publishing or "mechanical" royalties are incurred as no master recording has been exploited. Some companies promote covertones, which are ringtones that are recorded by cover bands to sound like a famous song. Recently Ringback tones have become available, which are played to the person calling the owner of the ringback tone. Voicetones are ringtones that play someone talking or shouting rather than music, and there are various of ringtones of natural and everyday sounds. A recent innovation is the singtone, whereby "the user’s voice is recorded singing to a popular music track and then “tuned-up” automatically to sound good. This can then be downloaded as a ringtone or sent to another user’s mobile phone".
As well as mobile music there are full track downloads, which are an entire song encoded to play on a mobile phone. These can be purchased and bought over the mobile network, but data charges can make this prohibitive. The other way to get a song onto a mobile phone is by "side loading" it, which normally involves downloading the song onto a computer and then transferring it to the mobile phone via Bluetooth, infra-red or cable connections. It is possible to use a full track as a ringtone. In recent years, websites have sprung that allow users to upload audio files and customize them into ringtones using specialized applications.
Video Mobile video comes in several forms including 3GPP, MPEG-4, RTSP, and Flash Lite.
Mobishows and cellsodes A Mobishow or a cellsode are terms to describe a broadcast quality programme / series which has been produced, directed, edited and encoded for the mobile phone. Mobishows and Cellsodes can range from short video clips such as betting advice or the latest celebrity gossip, through to half-hour drama serials.
Streaming Radio Mobile streaming radio is an application that streams on-demand audio channels or live radio stations to the mobile phone. Today, all major carriers offer some sort streaming radio service featuring programmed stations based on popular genres and live stations which included both music and talk.
TV Mobile video also comes in the form of streaming TV over the mobile network, which must be a 2 or 3G network. This mimics a television station in that the user cannot elect to see what they wish but must watch whatever is on the channel at the time. There is also mobile broadcast TV, which operates like a traditional television station and broadcasts the content over a different spectrum. This frees up the mobile network to handle calls
ePub is a widely adopted open source standard for e-books. Most dedicated e-book readers, tablets and smartphones can render ePub well, so that text reflows to fit the width of the screen and tables and diagrams display correctly.
“EPUB is the distribution and interchange format standard for digital publications and documents based on Web Standards. EPUB defines a means of representing, packaging and encoding structured and semantically enhanced Web content — including XHTML, CSS, SVG, images, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file format. EPUB allows publishers to produce and send a single digital publication file through distribution and offers consumers interoperability between software/hardware for unencrypted reflowable digital books and other publications.”
Scholarly peer-reviewed articles are most commonly supplied in PDF format. The majority of smartphones, tablets and netbooks will support reading PDFs, although in most cases apps will need to be installed to enable this.
Many PDFs are set up in a way that doesn’t allow them to reflow, which leaves a mobile user feeling as though they are reading through a small hole, and they have to move the document around under the hole in order to read it, which can be confusing and frustrating.
Audio visual content When serving audiovisual content to mobile devices the constraints are file size and connectivity. Allowing users to download content allows them to access it offline, but takes up space on their device and enables them to share it with others. Streaming content can help to prevent unauthorized sharing, but can increase users data costs or lead to a poor experience on a slow connection as the streaming content will buffer very slowly.
Most handheld devices support audio files in popular formats such as MP3. However, audio files can be large and due to limited storage capacity and data bandwidth users will not always be able
to download files larger than a megabyte. If a file is large give users the option to access a transcript instead.
Video files can be played on handheld devices through purpose built apps and through some mobile browsers.
8 Types OF Mobile Content
Course: Business Research Methods (DMS 502)
University: University of Nairobi
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