[quote=meadandale][quote=sdcellar][quote=meadandale]Don’t get me wrong, I’m always learning a few new things here and there (I read alot) but going full bore into doing phone development on a new platform requires an investment in equipment (you need at least one phone to develop to) and quite a bit of time.[/quote]A real handset, er phone, is nice at some point, but the majority of your work can (and should) be done with an emulator.
[edit]Never mind. Just read your follow-up post on emulators, and yeah, a real phone is key at some point.[/edit][/quote]
I did quite a bit of work on sony ericsson handsets with J2ME…and you only found out about the device idiosyncrasies when you put the phone on the actual device; the emulators would run the app fine.
I’m talking screen resolution, UI widget placement, color, memory…everything looks slightly different when it is on an actual phone. A real device has to be part of your development loop because if you wait until you are about to release to just ‘check it out on a real phone’ it will be the last time you ever make that decision 😉
Not to mention that some phone’s have firmware bugs (this was very common in the J2ME space where each phone would have a hand rolled JRE) that you’d never find on the emulator..only when your app was running in QA…[/quote]
Not to mention if you actually develop apps that are extremely dependent on hardware, such as the camera or the file system. You can do you basic development on the emulator, but it won’t get you very far. Every camera chip is different, good lucky trying to find emulator for that. Also, your PC is a lot faster than any phones out there and the file system on the phone is much less optimized than the PC. So, everything might work fine on your PC, but when you put it on the phone, you’ll find out quickly that reading a list of 1000s files from the EFS would crash the phone. That alone would change how your UI would look if you designed your UI around the assumption that the phone can queries for 1000s of files from the EFS easily. There are many more examples like these that make you very weary of developing purely on an emulator for a prolong period of time w/out a device. Emulator definitely have its place, but it can never replace a real device for a long period of time. Even though Nokia have the best emulator out of all the OEM (can’t speak for Apple), there were plenty of idiosyncrasies between phone and emulator that noobs would get told, when they said “but it works on the emulator”, that “we sell phones and not emulator”, so always check your cold on a device before check in.
