What is Mobile Applications

Mobile software is designed to run on handheld computers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), enterprise digital assistants (EDAs), smartphones and cellphones. Since the first handheld computers of the 1980s, the popularity of these platforms has risen considerably. Recent model cellphones have included the ability to run user-installed software.

Operating platforms

Windows Mobile, Palm OS and Symbian OS support typical application binaries as found on personal computers with code which executes in the native machine format of the processor (the ARM architecture is used on many current models). Windows Mobile also supports the Portable Executable (PE) format associated with the .NET Framework. Both Windows Mobile and Palm OS offer free SDKs and Integrated Development Environments to developers. Machine language executables offer considerable performance advantages over Java.