However it is not all bad. Many digicam companies are learning from the industry and are teaming up with mobile phone companies too help develop the latest in camera phone technology. The main benefiters of the rise in Smartphone have to be the general public. Who wouldn’t want all the features of a multimedia computer in their pocket? With prices as low as £250 for the latest iPhone, it beats the combined price of a digital camera, portable media player and standalone mobile phone.
While Smartphones are officially aimed at prosumuers (Professional Consumers) the reduction in cost is leading them to become available to the everyday consumer and the iPhone is the main example of this. 1,400,000 iPhones were sold in 2007 alone, many of which were to the everyday members of the general public. Smartphones are also getting smaller and thinner with each new release and this trend does not look like stopping anytime soon. The only thing that is increasing in size is the memory of the Smartphones. The iPhone has a standard 8GB memory but many critics cite this as not enough and deem it the main reason why consumers may choose the iPod Touch over the iPhone. While it does not have the phone or camera features, it does have wireless internet and up to 32GB of memory and it is much slimmer and lighter. Another feature of Smartphones that is the subject of much debate is the security of the phones. SymbianOS phones seem to be the main targets of hackers with a variety of viruses already reported including one that deletes all the users’ applications and blocks their access to the internet. However Smartphone developers promise to tackle these problems by increasing security measures on all further SymbianOS phones.
Overall I believe that the future is bright for Smartphones and the iPhone in particular. Sales are on the rise at an extraordinary rate and it does not look like slowing any time soon. Smartphones are becoming more accessible to members of the general public with prices lowering at an astonishing rate and it’s only a matter of time before the majority of adults in the developed countries own a Smartphone.
Types of Error Detection
Syntax Errors
Syntax errors are errors that prevent your program from running. They are caused when you break the rules of the language and the computer can’t understand what is meant. For example, not closing brackets or no end if at the end of an if statement.
Finding syntax errors is actually pretty easy, since the program cannot run until errors are fixed. When you press F5, if there are any syntax errors, you see a dialog box that reads "There were build errors. Continue?” If you choose “Yes”, the last error-free version of the program will run; if you choose No, the program stops and the Error List window appears.
The Error List window displays information about the syntax error, including a description of the error and its location in your code. If you double-click the error in the Error List, the offending line of code is highlighted in the Code Editor. You can also press F1 to display Help and get more information about the error and how to fix it.
Run Time Errors
Run-time errors are errors that occur while your program runs. These typically occur when your program attempts an operation that is impossible to carry out. For example, division by zero or when the computer can’t locate the file it is searching for.
Run time errors are detected most commonly when the program crashes but it is not always obvious as to what has caused it to crash.
Logic Errors
Logic errors are errors that do not cause the program to crash but not work in the way in which you were expecting it to. For example it outputs the wrong values etc.
Logic errors are commonly caused by a logical error in a statement (for example, a wrong or incorrect formula), an error in an algorithm, or even the wrong algorithm selected altogether.
One of the ways to find these types of errors is to output the program's variables to a file or on the screen in order to define the error's location in code. Although this will not work in all cases, for example when calling the wrong subroutine, it is the easiest way to find the problem if the program uses the incorrect results of a bad mathematical calculation.
