Enabling Mobile Chat Using Bluetooth

Mobile chat applications can be seen as an alternative and effective way of communicating for people without the need of using the mobile telephony system. Based on the new generation of cellular phones with support for communication technologies, such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, it is possible to develop applications to enable mobile chats. Such applications can provide mechanisms to discover and communicate with other devices in a shorter range, but with low or no communication costs. This article introduces Let’s Talk, a mobile chat and relationship application. It allows a Symbian OS Series 60 mobile phone user to create a profile and share it with other users. Also, it is possible to invite other users to a chat in a session. The profile sharing and the chat communication data are transferred over a Bluetooth connection. After creating your profile, a user can search for other profiles in the range of the Bluetooth connection and make your profile available to other users. In this article, we discuss design and implementation issues related to the application development using a Symbianbased cellular phone and the C++ programming language. The remainder of this article is organized as follows. We first present the technologies used to develop the application: Symbian OS, the Series 60 platform, the Bluetooth wireless technology, and the Cobain Framework. We then present the Let’s Talk software and the use of the technologies presented in the Background section. Possible improvements for the application and trends related to the theme are then offered, followed by final remarks in the Conclusion section. BACKGROUND