Adaptive I/O Switching for Seamless Convergence of Smart Phones and External I/O Devices

Abstract

To be small and easy to carry, mobile devices cannot be equipped with large and highly capable input/output devices. In order to overcome these limitations, this study proposes adaptive I/O switching technique as a general solution for exploiting full features of various external input/output devices in lieu of tiny input/output devices in a smartphone. Unlike existing physical-layer connection based solutions or application-layer non-system solutions, we propose a generalized solution at the mobile platform level. With this generalized solution, whatever activities of a smartphone can be resolution-adaptively displayed in an external display device. Also, the generalized solution allows us to use any kinds of external input devices for general mobile applications even if they are not designed so. Adaptive I/O Switching technique is actually implemented on open source mobile platform and its effectiveness is demonstrated with several example scenarios.