Over the last few years, there has been a renewed interest in the area of mobile and ubiquitous systems, like Internet of Things and mobile cloud computing. Research advances in this area promise to transform our world with systems that will far exceed those of today in terms of: effectiveness, adaptability, autonomicity, energy efficiency, precision, reliability, safety, usability, scalability, stability and user-centric applicability. The special issue of TETC on Emerging Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems devoted to recent advances in addressing challenges on emerging systems, applications, networking, middleware, data management and services for mobile and ubiquitous computing. The Call for Papers was issued in late 2013, with the submission deadline set to 1 March 2014. We have received overwhelming submissions, and ultimately 11 high quality papers have been selected in the first part of this special issue.