What phone?

Depends on what kind of development you want to do...

J2ME, Symbian, Brew?

I'm primarily a C/C++ programmer, so Brew would be easy. Java's pretty close too, so J2ME wouldnt be that hard. Anything compatible with both?

I can't help you with Brew, sorry... It's not really common (if available at all) here in Australia.

I'm a Symbian C++ and J2ME programmer and I'm pretty sure all Symbian phones are java enabled.

Well, I'm about to graduate DigiPen here in a year, and I'm movin' my butt to Australia to work. So screw Brew. :)

What phone would you recommend to dev for using Symbian & J2ME? Are cellular networks there GSM or CDMA?

If you want to dabble in both Symbian and MIDP development, I'd say one of the newer Nokia Series 60 devices. If you only want to work with MIDP (a much sounder choice from a commercial point of view), then the newer Sony Ericsson's (K700 and friends) have better Java support (Series 60 phones tend to have buggy JVMs).

shmoove

Symbian isnt very commercially viable? And what would make the Sony Erikson a better phone than something else? (ie: Is it an open source os? is its file structure unlocked to the users? etc etc)

Like I said, this is my first stop in researching Cell Game Development at all, so I dont even think I know what questions to be asking. (aside from what I read in the FAQ thread)

I've always liked Motorola phones for J2ME development. They're a lot better at giving you useful error messages than Samsungs, their JVMs are less buggy than Nokia's, and you usually can transfer MIDlets via a data cable rather than having to do OTA provisioning.

I know what a data cable is. What's OTA provisioning? Does Motorola support Symbian at all, or just J2ME?

OTA is "over the air" provisioning; it refers to either sending the MIDlet to the phone as an MMS message, or downloading it onto the phone over WAP. It's supported by any phone that supports J2ME, but depending on your plan, it might end up costing you a lot.

Like Sneftel said, the fancy Nokia phones tend to have wierd hard-to-track bugs in the JVM that can make Java development a bit of a pain. That's why I prefer the Sony Ericssons. The newer Motorolas are also nice (the old ones like the T720 are really crap, and so are the old SEs like the T610).

And Symbian, at least as a game platform, has a very small market. As far as cellphone games go, it's just about all MIDP and BREW (and it costs money to become a BREW developer, so MIDP is the best option to start with).

shmoove

I figure it's clicky time (some reading material that might help you decide what direction you want to take):

For J2ME start here.
The Wireless Toolkit.
Installing apps through the web (OTA).
BREW developer resources.
Benchmarks for MIDP phones.
An older thread with plenty of links.

shmoove

Quote:

Original post by Sneftel I've always liked Motorola phones for J2ME development.

Eh? Sneftel, I know you know way more about this than me, but a lot of people have recently been telling me that Motorola phones are a nightmare to debug and program . I was told the best phone for J2ME was the SE K700 etc, but personally I've found once you are aware of the S60 caveats and JVM bugs they are pretty easy to deal with.

Quote:

Original post by pkelly83 Quote: Original post by Sneftel I've always liked Motorola phones for J2ME development. Eh? Sneftel, I know you know way more about this than me, but a lot of people have recently been telling me that Motorola phones are a nightmare to debug and program . I was told the best phone for J2ME was the SE K700 etc, but personally I've found once you are aware of the S60 caveats and JVM bugs they are pretty easy to deal with.

The SE's are fine for development too. I dunno what "a lot of people" are talking about WRT Motorolas being a nightmare; they have a couple of quirks like any other phones, but they definitely have less of them than most other phones. In particular, the iDEN phones have a rock-solid JVM and will happily tell you exactly what is going wrong. As for the S60s, I've found their "caveats" tend to take the form of race conditions deep in the system, which in some cases are virtually impossible to work around, and a MMAPI implementation that is truly horrific to work with.

Personally I'm using a Nokia 6630 for Symbian development. I like developing for Nokia's because there is a lot of information relating to series 60 deveopment (I learnt Symbian with the book "developing Series 60 Applications").

You can you bluetooth, infrared, data cable or OTA for the 6630. I got a data cable free when I bought the phone, so I just use that. For my work I don't need to worry too much about porting to other phones, so I have just stuck with Nokia, so I don't have any experience with developong for other manufacturers.

Good luck.

Frankly all phones have their quirks but in terms of great tools and consistancy Sony Ericsson win hands down. On Device Debugging is ace!

So sounds like either the new Motorolas or the Sony Erikson K700s are the way to go. And, seems like commercial development for these things is pretty limited to J2ME? I used to do Java back six years ago, but I'm primarily C++ anymore. Shouldnt take more than a weekend to learn...

Thanks for those links, too!

Symbian's fine, but it's restricted to very few phones. BREW is sort of a braindead API, but the real problem with BREW is the licensing restrictions; you can only release a BREW app if Qualcomm lets you (via electronic signature). You can't even test out a BREW app on a phone without Qualcomm giving you the say so. That leaves J2ME. It's a slightly limited API but it's widely available and easy to develop for.

Sony Ericssons(SE) are teh r0xers!

They seem stick to the Java MIDP specs more than any other manufacturer!
The f500i is a beautiful little phone and if you have an IRd port on your laptop you can use that to transfer the midlets on to your phone. The SE dev tools and nice as well.

Avoid Samsung as you need to OTA midlets on to them. Go for a phone that will let you Bluetooth of Infra Red on to the phones. Makes putting on MIDlets easy.

We dont use IDEN much(at all) in Europe Sneftel, I think thats Japan, Korea and US?

Quote:

Original post by Sneftel MMAPI implementation that is truly horrific to work with.

It was the MMAPI they were talking about, and they were much better software engineers than me (Ok a lot of people == 4)! Event driven sounds are apparently awful to deal with on Motorola's because the sound chips and cpu don't talk to each other very well. Although they were not praising the 6600 by any means either.

I learnt over the past few weeks that you can do a hell of a lot more with J2ME than you think so I'd reccomend that as an API, although personally I'm dying to get properly stuck into Symbian. I probably still don't know enough about the S60 to even comment on it really, I'm just spewing advice that others have given me here!