Communication types

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Created: kiran10182 (08 May 2007)

Last edited: hamishwillee (30 Jul 2012)

Overview

Symbian offers different types of communications. Among all the communication types, voice communication plays a vital role.

Symbian offers such communications services as diverse as browsing and downloading from the Web, chatting over Bluetooth between two phones, sending a document to your office printer over infrared, etc...

Any of above events involves forming some kind of connection between Symbian phone and another device. The "another device" may be anything from a phone in the same room to a network server on the other side of the world. Symbian provides support for a range of communication technologies to enable communication with different types of devices, at different distances and for different purposes.

Types of Communication

• Serial Communication— Serial communication using Symbian C++ is a simple, low-level communication between two devices at close range. Symbian enables this type of communication over infrared or Bluetooth. This section discusses the techniques involved in creating a serial connection.
  
• Sockets— The Sockets API offers a higher-level point-to-point communication between two participants. It can be implemented over a range of physical and logical network types including infrared, Bluetooth and TCP/IP.
  
• TCP/IP— TCP/IP makes use of the Sockets APIs for accessing standard Internet services. Symbian 2.x adds support for multihoming, which allows multiple network connections to be open concurrently.
  
• Infrared— Infrared (or IR) is a simple, point-to-point communication between two devices at close range with a direct "line of sight" between them.
  
• Bluetooth— Often used for similar purposes as infrared, Bluetooth is a radio technology used for close-range communication between two or more devices.