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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."
Having recently be assigned a Window Mobile phone and not owning a Windows desktop I can tell you it's is *not* easy to develop for -- you need MS Windows and MS Visual Studio. I don't know about you, but I don't really want to pay $200 for an OS and $200 for development tools just to write programs for my phone.
With a 400 MHz processor and 8 GB of storage I don't understand why I can't just run a compiler on the phone. I probably wouldn't actually type code into the phone (though with a BlueTooth keyboard it wouldn't be that bad), but it would be nice to avoid the need for an ARM cross-compiling environment (and hence the need for a Windows desktop) and it would let me make and test minor modifications or debugging changes without needing to go back to a desktop somewhere and copy files around.
And add to that the time spent in learning Objective C....I don't think its used anywhere outside apple.
quoted: "There's a lot of non-tech-savvy people who would never consider ever getting any other smartphone that would love to have an iPhone."
This is called a trend. They die as fast as they come up. Give it a year or two and the iphone won't be so interesting.
Your specification for sellable is quite different from my specification.
I require, before buying the sw (for an embedded device like phone), that it has been tested on the hw. Free software is completely different matter.
Please do not claim the platforms are "same for all intents and purposes" as the purpose of the systems are clearly very different. For example if a sw can use wifi but not a data "call", it is broken.