[R] R on Mobile Devices (Android)

[Warren Young]

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.