Abstract ‘‘Mobile tourism’’ represents a relatively new
trend in the field of tourism and involves the use of mobile
devices as electronic tourist guides. While much of the
underlying technology is already available, there are still
open challenges with respect to design, usability, portability,
functionality and implementation aspects. Most
existing ‘‘mobile tourism’’ solutions either represent of-the shelf
applications with rigidle defined content or involve
portable devices with networking capabilities that access
tourist content with the requirement of constant airtime,
i.e., continuous wireless network coverage. This paper
presents the design and implementation issues of a ‘‘mobile
tourism’’ research prototype, which brings together the
main assets of the two aforementioned approaches.
Namely, it enables the creation of portable tourist applications
with rich content that matches user preferences.
The users may download these personalized applications
(optimized for their specific device’s model) either directly
to their mobile device or first to a PC and then to a mobile
terminal (through infrared or blue tooth). Thereafter, network
coverage is not further required as the applications
execute in standalone mode and may be updated when the
user returns online. The dynamically created tourist
applications also incorporate a ‘‘push model’’, wherein new
tourist content is forwarded to the mobile terminal with
minimal user intervention as soon as it is added or updated
by the administrator. Our prototype has been developed on
the top of Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) which offers an
ideal platform for the development of full-fledged, interactive
and portable applications tailored for resource constrained
mobile devices. The paper presents our
development experiences with J2ME and highlights its
main advantages and shortcomings in relation to the
implementation of such kind of applications. Finally, an
empirical evaluation of user experience with the mobile
application prototype is presented.