R on Mobile Devices (Android)
2009/2/6 Harsh <singhalblr at gmail.com>:
Hell R-list, 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.
First, rewrite R in Java. Good luck with that! http://code.google.com/android/kb/general.html#c
I really do not have an idea of the kind of definite incentives in terms of using R on Android, but having an analytical engine on a 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. R widgets could be created for analyzing the data streams from other apps running on the same device. Any thoughts/suggestions/information on this topic will be highly appreciated.
I think having the analytical engine on the phone is probably not a good idea for something that is pretty much connected all the time. Better to have a lightweight data collection engine reporting back to an analytical engine on a server somewhere. Then the analytical engine generates reports on a web page. The data collection engine could do trivial summaries, statistics and graphics in Java without needing R. If you wanted to do complex time series analysis then that would be a job for the off-phone server. Barry