Cell Phones For Easy App Development?

linnrose writes "When I purchased my current cell phone — a ATT/Samsung Sync — my primary reason for selecting it was Samsung told me I could install custom Java applications on it via USB or the microSD card; turns out they lied to me. I would really like to have a phone that is open enough for me to install simple Java (or whatever language; I'm primarily a C# developer) apps without having to download them from a server. And it doesn't have to be cutting-edge/feature-rich; gimme a nice color screen and good call quality. I'm thinking Nokia might have something useful, but I'm not sure. Any suggestions?"

Re:Become a registered iPhone Developer

[Z00L00K]

And you have to buy a Mac to develop them.

iPhone is the LAST phone that I would select for that. And I also suspect that if you succeed in porting Java to the iPhone Apple will blacklist that really soon since it will be in conflict with the developer license.

SonyEricsson, Nokia or any Windows Mobile phone should be fine. Operator branded phones may be lobotomized from the prospect of installing apps on them.

Re:Become a registered iPhone Developer

[Anonymous Coward]

iPhone is the LAST phone that I would select for that.

Depends if the apps are for yourself or to sell/give to others. iPhone is soon going the only phone that matters if you are developing apps for other people. And I know it sucks, I have one. But given the amount of activity in the App store and on the illegal installers you'd be hard to not recognize that the iPhone is here to stay. I suppose to fully understand you will need to spend some serious time with a jailbroken iPhone running firmware 2.0.

Re:Become a registered iPhone Developer

[Anonymous Coward]

God I hope not. What a dismal future that would be.

Re:Become a registered iPhone Developer

[Anonymous Coward]

you need to fine tune your crude statistics, % of market penetration for all phones does not give a good sense of things. Think a bit deeper... take those 1,150,000,000 phones sold, break it down by model ... how many models have people paying for applications? A small percentage I bet. Out of this small percentage... where does the iPhone rank?

If this number is significant then only the iPhone will matter.

Also factor in the following:
- iPhone is just over 1 year old and two model years old
- 3% for one model may be significant, how do the other models rank?
- safe to say this 3% is largely from the consumer side of things, what happens when business side of things picks up?

Re:Become a registered iPhone Developer

[toleraen]

Really? Are you sure? The iPhone is the only mobile phone that requires any and all legitimately purchased software installations to go through a single point of origin. There is no comparison to Symbian, RIM, Linux or Palm. Every other mobile OS has the legitimate option to install applications without 'phoning home' to their respective manufacturer.

It simply amazes me that so many people in the slashdot crowd don't see a problem with this.

iPhone

[Tom]

Yeah, someone had to mention the obvious. But the iPhone is really great to develop for. Once you've learnt Objective-C, the whole dev environment is very good, and I've heard that from quite a few people, many professional software developers among them.