Message-ID: <4991CE11.9090506@etr-usa.com>
Date: 2009-02-10T18:57:21Z
From: Warren Young
Subject: R on Mobile Devices (Android)
In-Reply-To: <e0bbde350902060412r1634a695h1e2840318b44fb04@mail.gmail.com>
Harsh wrote:
>
> At the cost of sounding far-fetched and almost incredulous, I would
> like to know if any R user is remotely considering the use of R on
> Mobile devices, and Android in particular.
In addition to the other objections in the other replies, I add this
one: the assignment operator and the parens are up on ALT keys on the
Android keyboard. Typing R expressions would be pretty painful.
You can demo this by installing an ssh client and logging in remotely to
a machine with R on it, and trying to use it remotely. A local one
wouldn't be better...it might not even be faster, because the faster CPU
on the machine running R might matter more than the speed of the network
link between client and server.
I briefly thought of what it would take to port R to an iPhone or iPod
touch, and the keyboard issues would be even worse.
Bottom line, R has the idiom of a real keyboard written into its bones.
To be popular, a statistical analysis tool for such devices would have
to work differently, taking advantage of the platform's native input
mechanisms.
> mobile phone would allow for micro statistics to be collected from the
> log files reflecting number of calls dropped, average time spent
> talking, a time series of the amount of time taken for battery
> recharge, and a host of other information that could be collated and
> analyzed.
I agree with the other person that the program to write to cover this
case would be just a stat gatherer, which somehow gets the data off the
device for analysis by R running elsewhere. It could be a web service,
or you could write a CSV file that somehow gets downloaded from the
device for use on the computer the phone syncs to.