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Seeking Advice on Cell phone to Develop for

Started by Luckless Feb 1, 2007 at 6:40 AM 2 replies 650+ views

Original Post

Feb 1, 2007 at 6:40 AM

So, this weekend, I'm planning to bite the bullet and finally get myself a cell phone. Or at least shop for one. However, since I will mainly want something that I can tie back into programming, I want something that is fairly 'roomy' as far as programming for it goes. Looking over websites for service providers in my area, most of their descriptions of the phones they carry seem to have nothing that looks useful in deciding what sort of things I can do on them. I'm a decent Java programmer, so switching to the mobile side shouldn't be too bad, but what sort of a range of useable memory can I get on cell phones? I know you are limited to something insanely small, but I'm wondering how much storage space I can get to play with, how small the loaded program can be, and how much I can stream in and out. (Or am I wrong in assuming I can use storage memory as a sort of swap space?) (And is it just the computers I'm on in the lab, or is the JavaME site running painfully slow? SE runs fine for some reason.)

shmoove

Feb 1, 2007 at 7:36 AM

Quote:
Original post by Talroth
but what sort of a range of useable memory can I get on cell phones? I know you are limited to something insanely small, but I'm wondering how much storage space I can get to play with, how small the loaded program can be, and how much I can stream in and out.

It depends on the phone. On the older J2ME phones a 64KB limit for jar size (includes all classes and resources) and 200KB of heap was pretty common. The phones coming out today usually have heaps in the several MB range and no limit on jar size (although if you are installing "over the air" the network operator might have a cap on download sizes).

Quote:

(Or am I wrong in assuming I can use storage memory as a sort of swap space?)

While many phones might do that, using Java you won't have any control over this and it will happen behind the scenes.

If you want to get better info on the phones capabilities (memory is just one aspect, with J2ME, the supported JSRs are also an important thing to consider), you should check out the manufacturer's developer portals.

shmoove

JohnLamock

Feb 1, 2007 at 12:13 PM

IMHO, SE phones (K700, W800, K300, W300 series) are the best ones to code for. Lots of memory, fast, very nice.

alnite

Feb 17, 2007 at 2:39 PM

While these powerful phones aren't bad at all to code games on, one of the challenges on cellphones is to make a game that fit on all sort of phones. shmoove mentioned 64K jar size phones which usually have 200K heap. There are also 128K jar size phones and the heap size vary from 300K to even 1MB (average 400K). New Sony Ericsson phones: w300, w810, k750, w850 are among the good ones that have heap/jar much more than you need it.

Then there's JSR, different screen sizes, audio support, image file support, various keys other than 0-9 * and #, bluetooth, GPRS connection, etc etc.

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