Information sharing with handheld appliances

Abstract

Handheld appliances such as PDAs, organisers or electronic pens are currently very popular; they are used to enter and retrieve useful information, e.g., dates, to do lists, memos and addresses. They are viewed as stand-alone devices and are usually not connected to other handhelds, thus sharing data between two handhelds is very difficult. There exist rudimentary infrastructures to exchange data between handhelds, but they have not been designed for a seamless integration into handheld applications. Handheld devices are fundamentally different from desktop computers, a fact that leads to a number of issues. In this paper, we first analyse the specific characteristics of handheld devices, the corresponding applications and how users interact with handhelds. We identify three basic requirements: privacy, awareness and usability. Based on these considerations, we present our own approach.