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Which Phone To Develop For?
Rob MacKenzie writes "I have to decide on a mobile phone to develop for. We're building a house with some automation built in, and we want the mobile phone to be able to control certain aspects of it, and retrieve information on what's going on in the house. Our choices are the usual suspects: Apple's IPhone, RIM's Blackberry, Nokia's line (Symbian), any Android phone we can get in Canada, J2ME generic app, or a Web-based UI we would interact with in the phone's browser. What would you choose if you had to go with one? Which exact model? We will be buying a few to develop for, so price is a bit of an issue."
Why not develop it for Windows Mobile? It doesn't have as many restrictions as an iPhone or blackberry, is well established, is widely available, and has a good sdk.
Though, I will say that the most flexibility would probably be from a web-based app. Then you wouldn't be limited to a phone. However, it wouldn't be too difficult to make something that could work both on Windows Mobile and desktop Windows.
...and the "easiest" solution is to go the web route. You can determine, based on the browser identifier, what is connecting to your web server and adjust the CSS accordingly. In our app, for example, I use a CSS library from Google Code to make the app look like an iPhone app when I detect it's an iPhone. I use a different CSS file when it's anything Blackberry.
Your server, therefore, is what should be the controller. I'm assuming you want to connect somehow to things like the air conditioning, lights, etc. The web server can invoke a CGI program, as an example, which talks to whatever serial lines are necessary to control said equipment.
Even better, you don't need to buy the actual hardware; get XCode and you get an iPhone simulator. Likewise, RIM has a simulator for every freaking model of every phone they've ever released (as well as for the different carriers).
Total cost to you should be zip for development purposes.