Getting device characteristics and network information.

Question

Hi All,

I am developing a context aware mobile application. I need to have information about the capabilities of terminal devices and network characteristics such as current bandwidth. My question is, are there APIs in android to access this information?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The better question is, are there APIs for these terminal devices to access the information from outside. Of course you can get the bandwidth of your phone to the provider, but to get that info of the terminal device, you need to access their data.

I would suggest a three-way request for that. At first there is a webservice, in your language of choice, e.x. PHP, which has to get access to the terminal device. That device has to publish their data somehow, so thats the first point you need to know. Then this webservice cleans the data like you need it and publish it as xml or json or whatever. Then your App in Android acceess the service to get the info and parse it into your app.

There are alot posts here to find out, how to get a HTTP Request Result. For parsing XML you can find something here: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/x-android/index.html

For accessing a network device with a specific port an such stuff, you can use PHP with the function fsockopen()