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:J2ME

[fractoid]

I believe Microsoft takes the credit for that one. Sun's premise was "compile once, run anywhere". Microsoft made it not work on Windows. Not being able to reach 90+% of your target audience = dead product. That was just the final straw. The bulk of the work was done by Sun dicking around with the APIs, renaming methods for no reason, and allowing platform- and version-specific bugs so that you'd have to test and debug a program on every single JVM version let alone multiple platforms. Java was great up until 1.3, at which point it really started to go downhill. It's now a massive bloated confusing mess that's only good for generating new buzzwords for Web X.0 Inter-Oper-Acronym-Ation.

Re:J2ME

[kramulous]

I'd like everyone in this thread to stop bitching about java and its mobile functionality and just move on. Master the language or let it master you. If you really want to continue bitching, do something about it and create a language and adequate compiler that will work on each one of the billion different types of mobile devices.

./ can really piss me off sometimes with these petty little complaints from people that clearly are not that sure about what they are doing in the first place.