Smart Mobile Phones

Channels

• Sensor Rich Application (All Purpose Tool)
• Location based services through Global position system (GPS)
• Social Network Features
• Video and Audio recording and sharing

See also the excellent wikipedia entry on smartphones

Examples

RapidAndroid is a joint collaboration with Unicef Innovation and Dimagi developing a port of RapidSMS onto the Android platform to provide an integrated, portable gateway for SMS based data collection. RapidAndroid allows users to use the mobile phone itself as a central collection and coordination tool.

Social network applications are developed also for mobile phone such as Sembuse. Felix Kitaka, a programmer from Appfrica, has developed a mobile application to access Facebook even for mid-range mobile phones.

Androids in the Bush (pdf) is a community project in Uganda, which uses smart phone tools for community-based monitoring. It enables people to act as a distributed sensor network.

Environmental monitoring with mobile phones in Ghana (pdf). Smart phones with different sensors are used to analyze environmental factors, from ambient air pollution to transportation and traffic patterns to noise pollution. Mobile sensing can paint a complex and dynamic portrait of the environment in which users are based.

CyberTracker (video) is an open-source software developed in South Africa by the Cybertracker Conservation. It can be used in development and conservation projects. Cybertracker can be installed on a GPS-enabled handheld device such as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or a Smartphone to collect geo-referenced data with detailed digital notation. It is a highly efficient way to gather large quantities of geo-coded field observations.