In my previous post on the Google Handset Alliance I commented that Google have a large amount of work to do and that they have to catch up with Symbian and Microsoft in terms of OS capability, tools and documentation.
Now that the early look SDK has shipped I must say that I under-estimated how much Google […]

It’s strange when you get a week when you get a topic that keeps appearing again and again. This week it was the UK mobile job market. I have had one of my clients trying to find a Symbian developer, a colleague in the industry comparing industry rates, someone I used to work with looking for […]

I am not a great fan of consuming web services from mobile JAVA or Symbian applications. They just seem to complicate mobile development unnecessarily. Also, applications tend to get bloated with service related code making them significantly larger (to download, use more memory etc) while the service calls themselves result in extraneous data being passed […]

The problems of mobile phone GPS (slow/battery hungry) and operator LBS (often closed to developers) have caused people to think about obtaining location in other ways. Skyhook have created a Wi-Fi access point database and associated windows/Linux/Symbian SDK to allow developers to obtain location to within 20m.
The clever bit is that after the database has been […]

At the beginning of this month, I commented on how some successful Java ME applications tend to be based on processing performed at the server. SteelByte Media, LLC have just released a new code editor to allow editing, syntax highlighting and even compilation of JAVA and C/C++ from within a Java ME application. It does this by submitting […]

This week, several things have made me think back to previous projects I have worked on where I have had to port code to Symbian. One thing stands out - if at all possible avoid porting code that’s still unstable and changing significantly. Otherwise, depending how you do it, you will may up doing the porting exercise lots of […]

There’s an free informative report at Vision Mobile that discusses use of the idle screen…
The main problem with this is that…
"Idle screen replacement requires integration of the AIS software with tens of relatively inaccessible APIs (application programming interfaces) which are only available to third parties subject to manufacturer approval. This implies that the AIS technology is […]