I've noticed a few people on freenode #j2me ask "Which phone should I use to start Java development on?". The question slightly surprised me - I became interested in J2ME the first time I got a sufficiently interesting phone (SE P800 with touch sensitive screen) rather than the other way round. I've been wondering about the criteria, and thought of the following.
- reasonable JVM (stability / speed)
- does it support MIDP 2.0 ?
- what are the tools provided
- PC suite to browse and exchange files between PC and phone
-
emulators
- and do they work on your platform (Nokia's PC suite doesn't on Linux for example)
- bluetooth to connect and upload your midlets to the phone
(because that seems to work, more or less)
- type of phone (smartphone / PIM-like phone / UIQ device etc?)
<obperl>I see that Jarkko's Perl for Symbian project is still on hold with just the core language and no support for the phone GUI and feature APIs...</obperl>
