Beginning Mobile Application Development - Part 1

Day by day mobile phones are becoming more and more powerfull, and now days are coming when they will compete with Mobile Computers, Laptop and Desktop. Mobile Phone Software Development is becoming easy day by day, and now Smart Phone - a type of mobile phone, are like our personal computer, so developing software for them is now more or less similar to desktop application development.

New mobile phones have more main memory (i.e. RAM). Nokia N95 have 128 MB of RAM.

Nokia N95 8GB model have following memory statistics as per Nokia Forum

Source: http://www.forum.nokia.com/devices/N95_8GB

When I started programming I had a pc with 1.98 MB of RAM and it was diskless machine, after couple of year I was having access to Intel Pentium 3 machine which used to run at 533 MHz, as compare to this today's Mobile Phone runs at higher MHz and have more memory then my pc at that time.

Today we have variety of choices in terms of software development for mobile phones.

Mobile Phone can be categoried in following categories:

• Properitory Operating Systems(OS). (i.e. Nokia, Motorla, Sony Ericsson, Samsung basic phones)
• Properitory OS and J2ME supported
• BREW Supported - Most of the CDMA phones
• Smart Phones - with fully functional Operating Systems
• Handheld witouth Phone functionalities

Mobile Phone Operating Systems:

• Symbian Platform
• Windows Mobile
• Maemo
• iPhone - MacOS
• Android

Mobile Phone Run Time Environment which support 3rd party Application Development

• J2ME
• BREW
• BlackBerry

Choice of Language as software development for mobile phone

• C/C++
• Symbian C++
• Java
• Python
• Flash, ActionScript

Choice of IDE for Code Writing

• Microsoft Visual Studio for Windows Mobile
• Nokia Carbide based on eclipse for Symbian Development
• NetBeans/Eclipse for J2ME development
• BlackBerry IDE for J2ME on BlackBerry Mobile Phones
• Adobe Flash CS4

To be continue...