What is the most fun/hard/easy mobile platform to develop for today?
I had a SonyEricsson P800 running Symbian OS a long time ago and did some Java applications on it. I felt that JavaME was so limited at that time, but it was maybe 5 years ago. Please, share your experiences; I need an update.
My next phone (in the next few weeks) will be an Android-based G1. Not so keen on the Java-based development, but I can understand why they did that.
I am more of a server-side kinda guy (big websites and scaling in PHP), but I am thinking of playing around with that though.
I have only tried iPhone and Android, but between the two, I think Android is the most "fun." Mainly because I don't really like ObjC much, and I have had a lot of experience with Java. It does annoy me that you can't use the normal JDK, but it's not that big of a problem.
Also, when developing for the iPhone, you have this constant fear that they will reject your app. Many great ideas would never be allowed into the App Store, so people resort to the usual shovelware.
I think iPhone's is, by far, the most fun and exciting platform to develop for. Even though I am not a huge fan of Obj-C, its API is full featured and quite easy to use. Apple's AppStore behind makes it the most compelling platform to work for. Despite all the bad rep Apple has for its unclear approvement process. Documentation is very good.
PalmOS? Too old and almost unsupported by now. Complete lack of good development tools. Documentation is very bad.
Windows Mobile? I like Windows Mobile. In my opinion, Visual Studio is the best IDE you can use to code, and that's what you use when you develop for Windows Mobile. Having said that, Windows Mobile really rocks for FormBased applications, but for general purpose ones, is still behind iPhone's. Documentation is very good.
Android? I like it. It's very good. But even though I like Eclipse for Java editing, it's not that great for mobile development. Its simulator is too slow. I haven't used it that much though. Documentation is quite alright.
Symbian? Having C/C++ behind is the most difficult one. But it has the biggest installed base so it can't be ignored by any mean. Tools aren't that great and neither is documentation.
Blackberry? Java based. Easy to use as long as you don't mess with protected API (your app will need special approvement from RIM to use it). If you take into consideration Java based API's, I like Android better. But RIM's installed based makes it difficult to ignore this platform.
JavaME? Only for low end phones.
Well, fun and easy would presumably go together.
By reputation, Symbian OS C++ is the hardest platform to develop for but most people who spread this are not up to date on the latest initiatives to fix the issue. It will probably still be true for a little while.
I would say Android has a huge advantage over iPhone in terms of fun, at the very least because of openness and linux core.
J2ME and blackberry are not supported well enough and too fragmented to be either fun or easy. PalmOs is dead and WebOS is not there just yet.
I would still suggest using a very recent Symbian phone mostly because of the sheer diversity of development runtimes available : nsbasic, .net, ruby, python, j2me, c++, c, webkit, opera widgets... It will be even better soon when the whole platform is open sourced.