How to develop products on mobile phones

Question

Hi there,

Recently we are going to develop some products on mobile phone (specially for 3g). There are many platforms about mobile phones: iPhone OS, Symbian, Black berry's... If I want to develop a product, should I use Java or write every program for the main platforms?

Particular one question for iPhone development: are there many Java programs on iPhone? Most iphone app I've seen are developed by their own xCode.

I need some guidance on how to do coding for mobiles correctly. Can someone help?

I am new to this field and I am looking forward to your reply~

Thanks in advance~

Answer 1

Java is not available for use on the iPhone; you can use Objective-C, C and C++ to develop iPhone applications.

Answer 2

There is currently no Java for iPhone, so you need to develop separately for iPhone in objective C.

Alternatively you can create application which runs in web browser, it'll be available on all platforms, but not every application is suitable for web.

Answer 3

All these platforms are completely different beasts as in the old days. About symbian, (which I am most familiar with) you can use Qt for quality native applications. Native api is confusing so avoid it where possible. If your application is simple, you can even get away with python.

In short, use the language which you are most productive available for each platform. Their apis are wildly different anyway. Language choice doesn't matter as much as the choice of platforms you are supporting.

Answer 4

Have you considered you using web technologies? There are a couple of cross platform tool kits for iPhone and Android. They work in the same fashion as Adobe Air. Allowing you to make HTML/JS based web app and run it as native code in the browser.

Titanium Mobile (Android & iPhone) HTML/CSS/JS Corona iPhone Only via Lua

Palm's Web OS is also based on web technologies.

Finally the old guard, Symbian Provides a Web Widgets system, that works in on all handsets with 9.2 fp 2 installed (n95,e72, n97 etc.) The api supports some hardware functionality.

The only one left out in the cold is Windows Mobile. There is some 3rd party support in the form of Web Widgets by torch mobile

Answer 5

It's currently limited to iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android (and possibly WinMo) but you may want to check out the open source project called PhoneGap. I think it is basically just a native wrapper around the built in web browser for each device, but it does expose some functionality not normally available in that environment such as geolocation, accelerometer, sound, etc.