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?"

Depends on your audience

[Anonymous Coward]

I've done development on Symbian and Blackberry products; advice for these: Run away, terribly fast.

I haven't explored Windows Mobile due to it's serious speed stability issues on the two phones that I've had that run it, but it's likely your only hope for C#.

If you can do C, Objective-C for the iPhone looks quite tasty (I've only browsed the source), and the Android platform is mostly here now, with some very tasty phones coming to major carriers this Christmas.

So my advice would be that you need to decide whether you need to make money from this application, and if so from whom. If your target market is all Microsofties, then get their platform (the T-Mobile Wing among the more tolerable phones), and code for it.

If not MS specific, then the question comes down to money. If your app. is ground breaking and cool, I'd lean toward an iPhone, Objective-C, and the AppStore. If it's just for you or to share with the world (like a cool pocketable Nagios monitoring daemon) and you'd like a large community of users regardless of their funding, Android.

Re:Windows Mobile?

[rufus t firefly]

I have one of the Veriozon windows mobile phones, it has .net compact framework, and even compact sql server.

I got it mainly because I could write my own c# apps for the thing. Visual studio even has a nice emulator built in.

I can't quite get over Windows Mobile's horrific interface design. I mean, if I wanted a small desktop, I think I could just buy one [asus.com]. It's not really designed to be controlled with fingers (opting instead for a stylus), and is a pretty huge pain to use. Not that some of the other entries in the mobile phone OS market aren't horrible ... Nokia managed to get around the finger problem recently with their menu system in Maemo [maemo.org], even though that's not really available for phones.

Here's to hoping Android works better in "real life". Running it under Windows Mobile is painful at best.

Re:OpenMoko

[xhrit]

i'll second that. I love my openmoko.