Leverage these building blocks for your mobile solutions
When I think about mobile technology, a handheld device is only a part of the solution. The unit may or may not have a touch screen, and may or may not have wireless capabilities. There is no "perfect" device, as every user and application has unique requirements, and depending on the specific technologies that your particular solution requires, the best tools to meet your needs might be a very interesting combination.
By the time you finish reading this article, I hope you'll have a new appreciation for often-boring technologies in your toolbox and the potential that these technologies have to drive significant return-on-investment for your mobile business solutions.
Barcode scanning
Many devices have integrated lasers for barcode scanning, but there is also a plethora of add-on scanners that connect to just about any device through an expansion slot, cable, or Bluetooth.
While laser-based barcode scanners are certainly the standard within the industry, there is a flurry of innovation around optical scanning technologies that would allow a device to recognize a barcode through an image captured by a regular digital camera. In addition to a handful of SDKs that offer this capability, Motorola launched the MC35 with optical-only scanning and has really done a lot to raise awareness about this emerging technology. Even so, there are still challenges to reliably scanning 1D barcodes optically, which are partly why many companies are focusing on 2D barcodes for optical scanning on mobile devices, including Microsoft's new Live Barcode standard.
This Socket scanner can allow any Bluetooth-enabled device to quickly scan barcodes.
Another twist we can put on the barcode discussion is actually displaying a barcode on the device that is scanned by external readers. While this may seem cutting edge, it is already being used for baseball and movie tickets, and the airlines are working together to create an industry standard for wireless boarding passes.
Biometric authentication
While some devices like the Toshiba Portégé G910 have built-in fingerprint scanners, there are also a variety of add-on devices that provide fingerprint scanning capabilities. Privaris offers a Bluetooth-enabled scanner, and Veridt has a scanner that can plug into a Compact Flash slot.
In addition to authenticating a user for security purposes, this same biometric fingerprint scanning technology can be used for many other purposes as well. For instance, a nurse could scan a patient's fingerprint to pull up their medical history and make any necessary observations.
Other types of biometrics besides fingerprints are retinal, facial, gesture, and voice. Oki Electric has a retinal scanner for use with mobile devices, and VoiceIt Technologies has a mobile product for voiceprint-based authentication. It is only a matter of time before all of these biometric technologies become commonplace.
GPS integration
