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Nokia to Become Involved in Eclipse Development
jondaw writes "Builder UK says that Nokia is to become more involved in the direction of the Open Source IDE, Eclipse. 'Nokia has increased its level of involvement in the Eclipse project by becoming a board member and strategic developer. It will take the lead in developing tools for mobile applications based on the Eclipse platform. One if its aims will be to extend the Java-based IDE to have full support for J2ME.'"
Between this and the last article, it begins to seem like IBM is doing more than Sun is to take the leadership position in Java lately.
I wonder how Harmony is doing...
Java is used on well over half the mobile phones out there (other ones being BREW), and recent Symbian OS (serie 60) are used only by some Nokia phones and like one panasonic. So it makes more sense for software makers to target the Java market.
Hopefully, somewhere down the road, this will enhance the quality of their mobile phones. One of the old Nokia cell phones I used had a few defects; for example, the battery compartment always wanted to slip off. But one has to wonder, exactly, what kind of direction Nokia is headed. Do they really think this is good news for the millions who use their products everyday? I think that taking chances like this may turn into a sour deal for them. Using GNU/Linux -- Windows-free zone!
:-P
How is Nokia investing in software development tools going to help them improve the quality of the physical components of their phones, such as battery compartments? I very highly doubt the plastic case of the phone was programmed in Java
As for their users, this is for developers, not users. Users don't write phone software, developers do.
Overall....one very weird comment.
you've had the pleasure of only dealing with the j2me emulators, which are of ok quality and certainly of good quality when compared to most of the competition. the documentation isn't bad and it's easy enough to mess around. however, some of the emulators from them take ages to start up and are _heavy_(especially those based on the crap wins symbian 'emu' - that would be the s60 emus).
.net2003 started again, luckily).
but as a whole for example the symbian devkits are a horrible mess, bad documentation, unworking example code etc..
some other pc apps from nokia aren't that hot either, often eating tens of megabytes memory for no apparent reason and yesterday installing pc suite fucked up some msxml dll on my laptop too(after getting the dll from web and regsvr32'ing it
besides.. for eclipse, eclipseme totally rocks and supports nokias emulators as well.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Funny, for the two years I've been working with J2ME, I've found Nokia's MIDP implementations to be the most compliant. Their phones are split into Series 30, 40, 60 and 80 devices (and a few editions), and each group has clearly defined capabilities.
Have you worked with other manufacturers' phones? Don't tell me that Nokia has worse standards compliance than e.g. SonyEricsson P910i, which looks like its "Java support" was written by a stoned teenager over a weekend...