Best Platform For Hobbyist Mobile Development?

An anonymous reader notes a blog entry, possibly his own, comparing and evaluating 8 mobile platforms from the point of view of their suitability for a hobbyist programmer. Covered are iPhone, Java ME, Windows Mobile, Linux, Palm, Brew, Symbian, and Blackberry. The writer seems open-minded and is a strong fan of free software, but he gives the edge to Windows Mobile for this class of developer.

Comments

Re:Badly written

[Iftekhar25]

This article is fluff. The section on the iPhone is common knowledge. He's never touched the Blackberry, never worked on Brew, he's waiting for Palm to do something, there's no indication he's developed anything on Symbian, and he "doesn't see any way" to develop for Linux because of lack of tools.

Nothing to see here.

Oblig OpenMoko shill

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course, if it's just for yourself, you should check out the OpenMoko. It is the most open phone with the best developer support. You are literally writing GTK apps running on real Xorg and real Linux. And the whole point is that it's open, so no vendor trying to lock you out.

And the Neo 1973 GTA02 hardware is looking to be pretty sweet. Includes 3D accelerometer, GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and touch screen (with rumor of enabling multitouch through a driver update).

Re:My Take

[Xtravar]

Zomg was it a Symbol, Intermec, or HHP device? :)

Hello, fellow Windows Mobile barcode scanner developer. I hate my life.

I hate the compact framework. It's got limitations everywhere that drive me nuts. It's a memory hog. P/Invoke is virtually required. Generics make jitting 10x slower, and it's already pretty damn slow.

I hate taking 4 minutes to deploy a multi-dll app using Visual Studio.

I hate debugger freezes that require soft-resets.

I hate how every device behaves differently.

I hate constant out of memory errors since the compact framework is a memory hog and the devices are all under-equipped.

I hate how CF 2.0 apps are compiled to be "hi-res aware" because Microsoft assumes that all of your controls are going to scale properly.

I hate the input panel and it's flaky behavior.

I hate Microsoft SQL CE. Poor documentation. Vague errors. Slow.

I hate having to deal with 3 different barcode scanning APIs from 3 different vendors that won't give me devices or up-to-date documentation.

Basically, the only reason I'm still doing this is because the other teams at my company are using VB6. I think I'd rather die.