Microsoft Research working on fast phone app loading

[visualbuffs]

It can sometimes take a little while for a smartphone application to load once you press on the app's icon on the phone's touch screen. Having said that, how would you like super fast access to the apps that you use the most? We think you would like that a lot. Thankfully, Microsoft Research is working on such a technology project right now.

In a post on the Microsoft Research site, the project has been given the interesting name FALCON (Fast App Launching with Context). Basically, this new technique has the smartphone OS figure out which apps its owner uses the most. Those apps are then pre-loaded on the smartphone via FALCON.

Microsoft states:

We use novel features derived through extensive data analysis, and a novel cost-benefit learning algorithm that has strong predictive performance and low runtime overhead. Analysis shows that the user can save up to 35 seconds on a single app launch, resulting in significantly improved user experience.

Naturally, the team, based at The Mobile Computing Research Center, is using the Windows Phone OS to test out FALCON but at the moment there's no word on when, or even if, this technology will be implemented in any future version of Windows Phone.

Source