Programming fo E61

Does anyone know what would be the best way to develope applications for E61
phone. I would rather use ide. The language does not matter but speed and
memory consumption is of course important.

On Sun, 05 Nov 2006 20:28:00 GMT, Ilkka wrote:

> Does anyone know what would be the best way to develope applications for E61
> phone. I would rather use ide. The language does not matter but speed and
> memory consumption is of course important.

4 alternatives:

- Flash Lite. Current S60 3rd edition phones such as the E61 supports Flash
Lite 1.1. Depending on what your application does, it might allow to
develop it fairly quickly. You'll have to pay for the IDE though and i'm
not convinced about the usability of Flash on S60 for anything but small
silly games. I haven't yet come accross any real and useful application
developped in Flash for S60 (apart from small silly games as i said).

- Java with the J2ME platform. Allows your application to be cross-platform
to some extend but J2ME apps on Symbian take ages to start, eat memory like
pigs, are quite sluggish, have a pretty poor UI and have a limited access
to the phone's functionalities. In other word, only use Java if you really
have to (if you have a strong requirement of having a cross-platform
application that can also run on dumbphones).

- Python: don't know much about that. Have a look at their home page:
<http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/pythonfors60/>.

- Native apps in Symbian C++. Even with a good experience in C++, you'll
have a hard time at the beginning with Symbian C++ but if you want to
develop fast, efficent and full-featured applications with good UIs then
you do not have much choice and you'll have to go down the C++ path. If you
do not have any experience with C++ then forget about it unless you're
willing to spend a huge amount of time and effort in your project.

I suggest that you start at <http://forum.nokia.com/> and
<http://newlc.com/> to get started.

Alternatively, you might want to simply develop a web application that can
be accessed from the phone's (very capable) web browser.

<http://www.redfivelabs.com/> are developing a port of the .NET Compact
Framework to S60, which ultimately should allow you to develop applications
in C# or VB .NET. It's still in beta though and i haven't heard from them
for a while so i don't quite know how their project is going on.