Cell phone development is like app design in the '90s

If you look at the state of cell phone application development, it feels like it is still in the stone age. I was thinking about the (possible) major cell phone platforms (s60, iPhone, and Android) and there not a single development platform that is consistent across them.  S60 gives you C++, J2ME, and Python. iPhone gives you Objective-C. Android gives you Java (not sure how much, though, full Java 5?). Notice how there is no platform that cross-cuts all of them. Java comes the closest, but please, who wants to do Java development when they can avoid it (I am obviously one of those people who thinks you should use a language like Python or Ruby for app development and leave languages like Java and C to systems programming).

And I don't need a cross-platform GUI library since cell phones have such varying input styles. But if I have basic application logic and model manipulation that is consistent across platforms I would be a much happier person. I suspect the instant this happens then cell phone development will spike.

Latest musings on the mobile web

I got my cell phone bill the other day and the number of minutes I used for international calls to the States dropped dramatically; less than an hour! Now that number is not indicative of the amount of calling I make to the States since just the other night I had a three hour conversation with a good friend of mine. The power of VoIP (through Truphone) is really nice.

And using my cell phone for VoIP calls has really shown me how much of a difference is made when you have full mobility within your home. I never reall got into VoIP before since I didn't want to be tethered to my laptop. And this is coming from someone whose computer is a PowerBook and has a very nice Bluetooth headset (which is mainly used with my cell phone on long drives). The ability to just wander throughout my house as if I was using my cell phone over the cellular network is great.

I have also found out the JAJAH now has a mobile web page interface. That's great since they *still* have not released a version of their mobile client for my phone. Might be useful for those times where my Internet connection is a little flaky.

I also have rediscovered the Google Personalized Homepage. After discovering the enhancements they have made at google.com that are not available at google.ca (along with the fact that some gadgets just don't work from google.ca for some reason, like the GCal gadget) I have started to use it again.

But the mobile-related piece of new is the link at far right of the link bar on the bottom of the page is called "mobile". There it takes you to a page where you can configure your personalized homepage for your cell phone. That was a nice surprise as I was able to set it to just what I would care about on my cell phone (weather and movie times).

Maybe I will finally cut down on my international minutes charges on my phone and redirect it to a data plan on my cell. Seems like I am finally starting to get stuff the way I want for actually caring about the mobile web.

Is VoIP on a cell phone so hard?

I have been having trouble with my Nokia E70 lately. I decided to switch on SIP calling as the default and to automatically log into my Truphone account. But when I did that I ended up triggering some bugs that have manifested themselves by locking up the keypad and weird screen issues on occassion. Obviously annoying stuff.

Now supposedly better firmware should be coming. Apparently production firmware from Nokia tends to start in 3.x and my phone's firmware is in 2.x. Obviously that does not excuse Nokia from releasing buggy firmware on a production phone, but at least gives me some hope that things will get better. Plus various phones have been getting STUN support and mine doesn't have it yet so something is probably in the works.

Regardless of the firmware thing, it is causing me to hope that some new handset maker or open source group manages to get cell phones right. From what little I have read on Symbian and know about what it does and does not allow, it sounds like an odd OS. It has caused me to wonder if a microkernel would be a good solution. I wouldn't mind if some app crashed or service crashed on my cell phone if I could bring the service back up. But if it brings the whole cell phone down it sucks.

But pretty much every open source cell phone runs Linux. TuxPhone, OpenMoko, and the Qtopia Greenphone all run on Linux (there is also the GPE Phone Edition but it doesn't have a physical phone for itself). At least Linux runs on enough embedded platforms that it should work reasonably well for a cell phone.

The Apple iPhone runs OS X which has never proved its meddle in an embedded system.

And I don't think a single one of them supports VoIP. Sigh. This is when knowing what is possible in software and not having it at your disposal because you are not a hardware guy sucks.

Playing with my Nokia E70

Got my Nokia E70 that my mother was kind enough to buy me as a birthday/Xmas gift. And now that I got my laptop back I have started to play with it (sans Python programming as I am still trying to get the phone set up).

First thing was getting iSync to work with the phone. It is not supported by default, but there are instructions on how to add the config info yourself. It worked and now I have my contacts from Address Book on my phone, complete with photos (although it looks like there is a white border to add a shadow look to the thumbnail photos and it makes me keep thinking they are an improper size).

I then got all of the Google stuff I could. First off is Gmail provides two interfaces for mobile access; web and an app. Gmail for mobile app is okay. It looks slick compared to the mobile web version of Gmail, but it has issues with portrait mode (it doesn't place the option button labels in the right place when you flip open the keyboard). The mobile web version is fine and works well, but isn't as optimized for getting around as the application version. I think I am going to be using the app version but just launching it in portrait mode and constantly reminding myself that the label for the bottom option button is not the label sitting right next to it.

Google Maps for mobiles works very well. They even have support for satellite photos!

After this is just bookmarking the various apps that have a mobile edition. Obviously there is search (which has the handy feature of downgrading sites so they are smaller and fit better on a small screen). Google Reader has a mobile edition. There is also one for Google News. Unfortunately the Froogle mobile version is for WML and thus doesn't work with the browser. And I don't care about my personalized homepage for my mobile phone.

I think the biggest pain I have found with Google and its mobile situation is having to find out about all of its mobile applications on my own. While I found out but all of these either through Google Search's mobile version or from the products list, I still had to find out about Google Reader on my own along with Froogle. I wish they were all listed in a single location ala Google Software Downloads for Mac.

I have started to minimize my dependency on my cell phone provider for phone calls. I signed up with Truphone to make SIP calls through a WLAN connection. Works well enough, especially considering the calls are free to the US and Canada numbers through March. The only complaint I have is that if you try to make a SIP call and you are not connected to a access point it says you are not connected and then makes it after stopping your call. You then have to dial again. Plus it leaves you connected to the access point after your call, draining the batteries (they claim it cuts the standby time in half). I am watching now to see how bad the battery drain is to know if I will need to explicitly disconnected when I am done with the call to save battery life.

JAJAH Mobile does not support my phone yet. Once I have that, though, I will be able to make calls to the States for cheap through my cell phone carrier but as an incoming call, which is nice when you have unlimited incoming calls. =) Hopefully they will add support soon and let me really minimize how many calls I get charged for by my cell phone carrier.

I have not found a free Jabber client for use with Google Talk. There is a shareware app called IM+, but I just don't feel like buying an app for chatting on my phone when I don't think I will be doing it that often.

I was also planning on seeing what it would take to write up an app to control Keynote from my cell phone, but it looks like Salling Clicker can do everything I wanted my app to do, and without me having to code it! =) Plus it controls a whole bunch of other apps.

Anyway, so far the phone is great. Much better than my Motorola RAZR. And I can only imagine what is going to happen when I learn how to program this thing using Python!

Good s60 (for a Nokia E70) sites or software?

I talked to my dad and my Nokia E70 is waiting for me when I go down for holiday next week. Of course I plan on installing Python for s60 on it when I can and start playing with it and install the various pieces of software I have mentioned before in my other blog.

But a slight problem I have is that I am totally new to the Symbian platform. This means I don't have the built-up set of links into the community for info and such. I was hoping someone out there who reads this blog might have some helpful links on playing with the phone, themes, software, etc. If you do please post a comment. Hopefully I will be able to collect all of the good links I find and put them up on my site (when I finally have time to get it up and going).