Free Development Systems for Cell Phones?

mongoose(!no) asks: "Does anyone know of a free development environment for cellular phones? Right now, my phone has support for Qualcomm's BREW. Qualcomm offers a free SDK, to develop applications. However, to put the application on a phone, it costs $400 to become a BREW authorized developer. I am in the market for a new cell phone and am looking for one I could write applications on. Smart phones running Palm, and Windows CE are too expensive for my budget. Do I have any options or am I pretty much locked out of writing software for my cell pone?"

Comments

Symbian

[cybereal]

Development for Symbian devices is open. Just take a look at Frozen Bubble for series 60 phones as an example. As for phones, the best smartphone on the market is UIQ/Symbian (Sony Ericsson P910a) and a variety of other phones use this excellent embedded OS. I personally bought an N-Gage QD simply to play with Symbian.

Don't understimate remote access of HTML/CGI

[GrpA]

I needed to build some apps for work. Database access, call logging, client timesheets etc.

I started to develop for Symbian at first - which is pretty good, and the SDKs are free, and there are a number of languages supported also.

But then I began developing web-apps for the phones that were sensitive to the phone's high bandwidth cost. Keeping the graphics to a minimum.

Now I can access databases remotely, pull down maps, and perform all the tasks I was going to run on the phone via the built in web browser.

It costs me five or ten cents per task for bandwidth on average... But that's nothing compared to SMS costs, and because it's not phone specific ( it is afterall, just a webpage ) now some of my co-workers have started to use the apps on less smart phones...

I think we'll see more webpages designed for 208x320 resolution in the future.... We could use a small banner "This website best viewed at 208x320" - but that's just a waste... Would cost me 0.1 cents per banner... :)

GrpA