File annotation and sharing on low-end mobile devices

Rapid technological evolutions in mobile industry have revealed new challenges for scientists and researchers by empowering low-end devices in the last decade. Mobile phones with excellent computing power and added features especially with huge storage capacities are very common in the market. As the storage capacity grows on such a device, it becomes very tedious for users to manage and organize different type of files. The file system of such devices itself provide some managing mechanism to store same type of files separately however it proves scarce as the number of files grows. Furthermore, limited user interface on these devices makes file retrieval more difficult. This paper presents detailed analysis of meta-data significance in our proposed framework to annotate and search files on low-end mobile devices. File attributes are extracted from the underlying operating system of the device and used as metadata of the corresponding file. The meta-data is then used for searching the required file. The file search can be performed on the device itself or on other devices when connected in a Personal Area Network (PAN) through Bluetooth. The proposed framework is implemented in Java Micro Edition and a full featured application is developed to demonstrate its validity. The application provides annotation, search options, Bluetooth module, file sharing and transfer options. Results from various performance tests show significant improvement in searching a required file through our proposed framework.