Usability and Implementation Experiences with COTS Products used as a Distributed Client Platform

This paper conveys some of the experiences with using commercial off-the-shel (COTS) products as clients to Bluetooth enabled devices, which have no user interface of their own, but relies on the COTS products for user interaction. The COTS devices used include several different vendors' models of the Microsoft Pocket PC platform (also known as Windows Mobile Professional or Classic) running .NET Compact Framework, as well as a number of different models of Java enabled cell phones from Nokia, Siemens and Sony-Ericsson. The specific case study is with the Taxmaster4 Windows Mobile product used with BMW automobiles as a driving log application. The paper concludes that many usability problems exist when using COTS products. These may to some extend be overcome by pragmatic design decisions, but it is necessary that the COTS products hardware platform and application programming interfaces should become better suited to support distributed user interfaces than is the case today. This includes better support for basic user interface elements as well as supporting Bluetooth and other wireless technologies more reliably. These issues should be addressed by the vendors and manufactures of these platforms, not the application programmers.