An open and portable software development kit for handheld devices with proprietary operating systems

The availability of modern handheld devices equipped with powerful CPUs, large main and secondary memory, Webcam and wireless connection suggests that those devices might also be used to develop sophisticated applications based on computationally intensive algorithms, including for example face recognition, object recognition, character recognition or speech recognition applications. A wide choice of software implementations exists for each of the categories listed above, but almost all of them are designed and developed for PC platform, and porting complex software from PC to the most common handheld platforms can be very time consuming and often inefficient. In this paper, we present Nanodesktop, a portable software development kit created to make easier and more efficient the development and the porting of complex software to handheld platforms, in particular those with proprietary operating systems such as the Sony Playstation Portable. Practical examples and real use cases are presented and evaluated. Nanodesktop is an open source software and can be freely downloaded for testing and evaluation.