Designing for the wild: There is more than mobiles, smartphones, PDAs and tablet PCs

• Mario Pichler

Context-Awareness plays a major role for the success of mobileapplications; this is true for context-aware (software)services as well as for the used devices themselves. Therefore,within this paper, we want to discuss the usage ofcontext-specific mobile devices as target platforms for newmobile applications. Nowadays, the primary applicationplatforms taken into considerations for new mobile applicationsare mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs),and tablet PCs. Because of this, the specialties of the deviceitself—its characteristics, features, and constraints—arelost. This is also the case for the majority of known mobileguide systems. A selection of mobile devices, being possibleplatforms for future mobile applications and a numberof case studies of those alternative devices as mobile guideswill be given.