With the dramatic increase of the online multimedia resources and the ongoing advance in the functionality of mobile devices, how to search the needed information from so many multimedia resources has been becoming more and more important. Due to their wellknown limited description ability etc, the traditional keyword based retrieval approaches can no longer meet the retrieval demand of users. Furthermore, applying these kinds of multimedia retrieval techniques to mobile devices directly is not feasible. Meanwhile, mobile device users have a growing eagerness to retrieve multimedia resources quickly and precisely.This paper describes the achievements of the research in multimedia retrieval techniques, which are based on the content and aim to be run on mobile devices, in detail. These new techniques function more precisely and rapidly, compared with existing techniques.