Smartphone for use with the NXT

Question

Greetings.

I will be getting a new smartphone for work. It needs to work with Telus, so the iPhone, and Android-based phones are out. The available phones appear to be include a number of BlackBerries, HTC phones, Motorola phones, as well as LG, Samsung, and ZTE phones.

I have a LEGO Mindstorms NXT robot, and would like a phone for which I could potentially write a program that would communicate with it over bluetooth. (LEGO does provide a cellphone app but it only works with some Nokia, Sony Ericson, and BenQ-Siemens phones).

From my research thus far, it sounds like many phones support J2ME and that I could install NetBeans to develop for it. (I haven't programmed in Java in years.) Unfortunately, it sounds like even if the phone does have bluetooth capabilities, they aren't necessarily accessible from J2ME.

Lastly, I'd rather like to develop from my Mac. (I could boot into another OS or fire up a VM, but I'd prefer not to.) NetBean's IDE download page says, "Java ME is only available for Windows and Linux." There appear to be workarounds -- is it a pleasant environment to work in?

So, my question is, does anyone know if any of these phones are, um, pleasant to develop a simple bluetooth application for, preferably from the Mac?

- Edit -

It turns out that my contract has not expired, and I've replaced my partially functional phone with a Treo 700 we had around. I appreciate all the answers. I started setting up a J2ME environment (until I learned that I may as well set up a Palm environment, and have started on that.) When I do get a new phone, though, I was sure be looking at the S60 phones -- heck, it might even trump an iPhone or Android phone, at least for ease of creating hobby applications.

Answer 1

Nokia ported python to the S60 smartphone platform. That means you can just write python scripts with your favorite text editor and then run them on any of these phones. The python port includes APIs for the camera, bluetooth, SMS, dialing, sounds, text to speech synthesis, location services...

I found it very easy to install the python interpreter and console on my phone and immediately start running scripts, no other tools required. If you have a strong thumb and like a challenge then you can even write the scripts directly on your phone :-)

If you want to run an S60 phone emulation on your PC then you will need windows and even then it is complicated to set up. For small hobby projects you can live without the emulator though.

Answer 2

You can try following combination for J2ME development on Mac OS X

1. Eclipse - http://www.eclipse.org/
2. EclipseME - http://eclipseme.org/
3. MPowerPlayer - http://mpowerplayer.com/sdk

Answer 3

I'm not familiar with the Canadian cell network, but the mobiles listed seem to be GSM models so you should be able to use any GSM phone on their network, including Nokia and the other NXT compatible models you listed. I would double check with the provider, but any unlocked GSM phone should work (including the iPhone and Android products).

Answer 4

You may be interested in this application NXT Director. The author says it has been tested with the following models of Palm based devices, Treo 650, LifeDrive, Zire72, SONY TH55/E and Tungsten series. It may also work with your 700.

Answer 5

Why will the andriod/iphone bluetooth stack not work with nxt