Customer Reviews

Mobile Application Development with SMS and the SIM Toolkit

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Because 3G is on the verge of being rolled out in the US by major carriers I purchased this book to explore how to best integrate the next generation cell phone with system management information for our data center. Although this book will work with GSM phones as well, our company is standardized on a carrier that will be making 3G available, so if you're using GSM my comments will also apply.

This book will get you started in mobile development quickly if you're using or going to use the SmartTrust toolset, which I highly recommend. This book is about those tools, so if you are not going to use them don't get this book.

The authors do not mess around. They introduce the basics, then very quickly jump into design, development and testing. If you're a developer you'll appreciate the lack of fluff and the fast pace. The book lives up to its title in all respects and is outstanding for anyone who needs realistic information about developing mobile applications using proven tools and techniques.

Very good introduction to SMS (Short Messaging Service) and its interaction with SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) in mobile devices, as of c. 2001. If you know nothing of the field (as I didn't), you can get up to date in a good day's reading. In that regard it was exactly what I was looking for.

Sure, lots of the technology has moved forward since this edition was published, but since the authors give plenty of well-organized references to the enormous body of standards covering mobile networks (not just GSM but 3G), SMS, SIM, etc. it should be easy to follow from where they left off to what's current using online resources. So I would not say this book is outdated, by any means.

While it's great that actual code examples are provided, the code is all MS Windows-based. Even the examples using web interfaces use VBScript. So if you're not savvy on MS/Windows programming (from what I read on Linux forums, there are actually some people out there like that!), you might not find the examples too useful.

A gripe about the book is the sloppy copy editing/proofreading. There are lots of typos and glitches - far more than a reputable publisher like McGraw-Hill should have let through.

For example, there's a chart (p. 123) showing the hex file names on a UICC smart card. Some of them have don't care bits in the file names, and are correctly shown as "4FXX" but one is shown as "4FSS." If you were new to this type of notation, this kind of error might cause some confusion.

And here's a real brain-twister, taken verbatim from p. 129: "No matter whose application it is, the subscriber can't figure out how to use it will call their network operator."

Trying to decipher these oddities (I finally figured out the word "who" is missing between "subscriber" and "can't") can bog you down. If it were once or twice, it wouldn't be a big deal, but there are many of these throughout the text.

So if you can breeze past those annoyances, this is a great survey book to bring you up to speed quickly.