I happen to have an aging Nokia E61 in my top drawer. The E61 is the first mobile I ever used as I proudly held back until 2005. I had simple criteria for getting a phone back in the days:
- A phone should have a QWERTY keyboard.
- A phone should be Java compatible
- A phone should be free (-ly provided with an expensive monthly contract)
Think it over. If all phones followed these 3 laws, they’d probably comply with Asimov’s laws of Robotics as well. And there wouldn’t have been an iPhone either.
Wait, did I actually write that?
Yes, because I want to remind my readers – none the least Antistar players – that Antistar development continues on iPhone. Don’t go think I’m giving up or something. My main problem is that for reasons I’d rather gloss over, I don’t have my sweet Mac Mini handy all day long.
Eventually, I’d like to release our games on both iPhone and other mobile platforms. Experimenting with J2ME is probably slowing down development a little, but I think it will eventually prove helpful (I’ll explain sometimes).
Anyways. I thought it would make sense for me to try running stuff on the E61. That is what I thought when I got this phone. In fact we got two of these at home – bulky, ‘high-tech’ antiques. Good place to get started.
Yea of course the thing’s got PC suite installed. So now I have to download the Ovi suite too.
Polite notice
I have the regret to inform you that Eclipse Pulsar may be a choice solution for your J2ME development.
This is because several manufacturers decided to create a kind of eclipse plugin / flavor that would make it easy to access their simulators, and they chose Eclipse.
I didn’t choose Eclipse. It took two hours fiddling to ‘migrate’ my Pingoo experiment to an Eclipse project. It’s not the first time I used it either. Well, never mind. So Eclipse Pulsar has a way to detect various phone simulators, settings and other fantasies. You have to give it a kick ($foomenu$preferences$devices$crow$klingon$etc or check here for a minimally workable example) first, but it works.
Strictly speaking, the annoyances are owed to the proliferation of utterly mobile meta-data clouding mobile development. Having said that, this is what IDEs are meant to help us with. That and preventing me from renaming my source files.
