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."

Comments

Definitely Web-Based

[TellarHK]

If you design your system with a web-based system, you can even go ahead and add other types of device into the mix while still properly supporting a phone. Something that works with the aging Nokia 770's web interface, or even the newer 810 would work just fine with an iPhone, or any flavor of Windows Mobile.

In my personal experience, the iPhone would be a great platform for something like this - though the cost of entry isn't so great. However, the iPod Touch would do just as well unless you really need to have cellular access to things from long distances. The Mobile Safari interface is nice and clean, and the "Sliding" paradigm used in a lot of interfaces for it seems to be quite user-friendly and not too tough to work with.

Windows Mobile might be good for development of a standard application, and Windows Mobile devices are a dime a dozen these days if you don't mind going back a few versions. Unfortunately, the underlying OS is.. Windows Mobile.

Unless you want to learn a new API

[w3woody]

Personally, having developed for Windows Mobile and the iPhone, my inclination would be to instead create a web-based UI.

The reason is simple: first, the web is pretty universal. You can (in theory) use it from almost any device with a web browser.

Second, it's going to be a lot easier to quickly prototype the control software than a custom client/server architecture with a custom protocol, which you'd get with nearly any mobile device.

And third, if you switch to a new brand of phone, you're not completely hosed; the worst thing that will happen are a few web page tweaks.

WAP & TAP

[Marxist Hacker 42]

For this purpose, I'd go dual interface, and not bother coding on the phone itself.

WAP (a cut-down version of HTML) works on all small-format web browsers, and should be your *high end* phone interface. But also, you should have a secondary interface, based on a voice modem, that is audio/keypress, and which would work with all phones hands down full stop.

bash & ssh

[ngworekara]

I use midpSSH (a j2me app) to control a number of bash scripts/command line programs for my media center computer from a non qwerty phone. The program allows commands to be saved into command lists, suits my needs, and let me sell my samsung blackjack (received for free from an AT&T upgrade) and downgrade to the slightly less ostentatious samsung a707 sync. It seems like you might want to write the code for the fun of it, but if you're looking for a quick solution, anything you can do from the command line can be done with this arrangement.

Re:Openmoko Freerunner

[jeremyp]

I don't know, I'd prefer to develop for a phone that people are using.

Developing for the iPhone or J2ME means at least you have quite a large installed base for selling your software.