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Mobile Interfaces

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

  • 13 Accesses

Synonyms

Handhelds interfaces; Navigation system interfaces

Definition

Mobile interfaces are interfaces specifically designed for little portable electronic devices (handhelds), like cellular phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and pagers. Mobile interfaces provide means to execute complex activities on highly constrained devices, characterized by small screens, low computing power, and limited input/output (I/O) capabilities. While this term is mainly used to refer to interfaces for classical Web applications, like email and Web browsing it should be intended in a broader sense, encompassing all Web and non-Web applications that run on little mobile equipments (e.g., GPS navigation systems).

Historical Background

Mobile interfaces came up with the proliferation of cellular phones through the 1980s. At that time, the notion of mobile interface was very primitive and the offered services were very simple: handling lists of contacts, usually limited to <name, phone-number> pairs,...

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Recommended Reading

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Giuseppe Santucci

Authors
  1. Giuseppe Santucci
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Giuseppe Santucci .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dept. di Ingegneria Informatica, Automatica e Gestionale, Universita di Roma, Roma, 185, Italy

    Tiziana Catarci

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Santucci, G. (2018). Mobile Interfaces. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_219

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