Mobile Ruby

Ruby is rapidly gaining popularity in the crowded world of programming languages. Ruby on Rails web application framework in particular is getting recognized for its elegance, simplicity and shortened application development time. Computerworld has just listed it among “The Top Five Technologies You Need to Know About in '07”. Revolution Health, startup founded by Steve Case, is the most prominent recent example of a site built using it.

Ruby for Symbian OS is I believe the first attempt to make Ruby available to the developers of mobile applications. The languages has been ported to the OS and Symbian has started work on extending it with a set of mobile libraries.

Rollable Displays

I did not have the chance to participate in the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona last month. I did however check the mobile awards bestowed at the conference. There are quite a few prizes to receive in categories such as best game, best music service, best video service, best enterprise service, best handset etc. What stood out for me was the innovation award received by Polymer Vision, a spin out from Phillips.

Mobile devices, at least to the users accustomed to PCs with broadband connectivity, have a number of limitations:

• limited screen real estate
• cumbersome user input
• constrained network bandwidth

Polymer Vision, with its rollable display, is addressing the first of these. The idea is to make a big screen available in a small device. The screen stays hidden in the device when not used. The user rolls it out when accessing the device. Rollable screens, rollable keyboards, high bandwidth, speech recognition are all on the wish list to make mobile devices easier to use. Polymer Vision is certainly helping to turn this vision into reality.

Do not rush to the store to buy a phone with a rollable screen yet. The company is planning to start manufacturing commercial quantities of the first generation, 5 inch displays this year. Telecom Italia is planning to market Cellular Book, the very first device using it.