Mobile Platforms in Research and Teaching

Mobile platforms are not only about commercial developers and ecosystems. Increasing number of universities and research units use off-the-shelf mobile solutions for educational purposes and for research projects. Platforms that are successful in those fields gain a large number of creative and skilled student developers as well as international presence in the research communities and popular media. An example of such hype, although not a mobile solution, is Miscrosoft Kinect known mostly for the research projects and the 'wow' factor rather than the gaming experience.
What makes a platform suitable for education? What will it take for MeeGo, both in terms of software and hardware to be 'the platform' for the most innovative and amazing projects, something that gains attention of the media? We try to answer those questions based on our experience with various mobile platforms (e.g. Python for S60, Android) in both teaching and research. We provide the examples of projects realised on those various platforms and identify the key properties in both hardware and software that made them possible. We focus on two current, cutting-edge projects for which only the Maemo/MeeGo platforms are suitable and show how those can become market solutions: augmented sound on the MeeGo platform utilizing concurrent real-time analysis of sound from multiple sources, and portable EEG real-time analysis setup where Nokia N900 is used to collect and analyse the data from the EEG headset.