Mobile Programming for Blackberry, iPod, and Android

Question

I bought an iPod touch 3rd Gen half year ago, and I got recently an iPad WiFi. I also have a Onyx Bold Blackberry. I don't have a Mac Book or any other apple product of laptop.

As a programmer, I speak C, Delphi and Java. I'd like to start playing around in mobile application.

I don't know whether I should start in Blackberry platform, iPod /iPad platform, or Android platform.

Ok, for each platform, what is the cheapest way to get started to play around the language? 1. Blackberry 2. iPod 3. Android

Any experience/story, suggestion, tips are hugely welcome. TIA.

Answer 1

Learn HTML5 and you can build apps that can work on all platforms such as IPhone/IPad, Android and Blackberry. You can just build a mobile version of your site such as mobile.mysite.com. You can then choose to implement the server side with the language of your choice/familiarity.

Answer 2

The path of least resistance and also of lowest cost for you is Java development for Android. Only problem, you don't seem to have an Android phone. Though i'm sure you can pick up a used one cheap.

Why: The Eclipse IDE is free, there are free Eclipse plugins available from Google for Android dev, there's no annual dev cost like with iPhone/iPad development

Answer 3

In my opinion, you should start with an Android phone. You will be able to write your applications in Java, and test your applications on the device. The iPhone requires that you write your applications in objective-c, and requires developers to be a part of the iPhone Developer's Program in order to run their applications on an actual device (The membership fee is $99/year).

The documentation for the Android OS is superb, and once you have installed the Android SDK with the Eclipse Plugin, you can have a hello world application finished in a few minutes.