By KRISTA GIFFORD
Published: June 24, 2008
The tradition of eating strawberries and cream at Wimbledon has been around since the tournament first began in 1877. In the United Kingdom, strawberries become ripe for picking in May and are synonymous with the arrival of summer and the beginning of the tennis season.
This summer, a new Wimbledon tradition has begun with the SoMo 650 handheld computer being chosen as the device that will assist event officials in the running of The Championships.
Wimbledon umpires will use the SoMo 650, which was chosen for its durability over consumer devices, stable ROM and built-in Wi-Fi® capability, to officiate tennis matches at the tournament.
The SoMo 650 handheld computers will run the Wimbledon Scorer application from EDH Sport, a provider of sports information technology systems. The application records all of the information required for an official score card, assists the umpire in managing the match by automatically prompting for events like change of end or change of balls, and provides a live feed of the match status on a point-by-point basis.
The system supplied by EDH Sport also registers entrants in the tournament, selects eligible registrants, and assigns each person their place in the draw for the first round of The Championships. After each day of play, the system produces a proposed order of play for the next day across the tournament’s 18 courts.
The running of an event like Wimbledon is a huge undertaking, and Socket is proud to be part of such an important system. The amount of data an umpire needs to process is constantly increasing, but advances in mobile technology mean that decisions are made and relayed quicker than ever. The SoMo 650 will play an integral part of the planning and running of The Championships.