so long and thanks for all the fish

Thanks to a great and patient friend, on xmas eve I received an early present in the form of a "t-mobile" pulse, made by Huawei, maker of all things 3g usb modemish.
And a nice phone it is to, though not without its faults, but a full review will have to wait, because this post is all about the end of an era: my use and support of Nokia phones and the grand promise of J2ME.  I've had a Nokia phone ever since I got my first brick (the original 6110) in around 1998. Hell I even had a Nokia the whole time I spent working at Ericsson!  I've used s40 and more lately s60 "symbian" OS models and have generally been happy with them all.

But a combination of slow development, a refusal until very recently to embrace open source and most shocking of all for a Finnish company, a complete neglect of support for developing on Linux (both with j2me and native symbian c++) was the final straw.
Of course given that Blackberry was not much better and Apple a whole lot worse, Android is the natural choice for me now.  In fact there are so many nice things to Android I'l have to keep my praise short and bulleted:

• built on a linux kernel
• uses java as the native application programming language
• no greedy, corrupt and plain insane signing policies
• whole OS and most apps are completely open source, which means I get to download the source code to the OS running on my phone
• development happens mostly in the open with git repositories, public bug trackers, etc
• an SDK that runs on windows, osx and Linux, but where Linux is a first class dev platform and not an after thought
• an App store which is open to all and yet still is not exclusive or the only channel to distribute and install apps 

So here is where I and Nokia and also the whole concept of J2ME part ways.  I'm currently working on a small personal project where I'l try as much as possible to still support the huge numbers of J2ME phones still out there, but it will the Android version that will have the full, rich support.

Its a bit sad in some ways because Nokia is trying to fix things. They have a decent new set of "5th edition" touchscreen phone models and those models and other new ones come with the WRT, which finally provides simple web-based way of writing apps and then distributing and installing them without the J2ME or Symbian  certificate signing madness. Oh and Symbian is now going open source and getting QT as its gui of choice. And the are even pressing ahead wih their innovative Maemo based n900. 

But yet its all just that bit too little and too late. If this has all happened in 2006/7 they would have had something, but now...

So too finish off with another Douglas Adams reference, Apple is quite likely those local council bulldozers that came long and demolished the house of that the old phone companies built. But it along with all the rest won't have too long to relish it,  given the great Android demolition space-fleet thats slowly and surely pulling into orbit.

Already Arthur Dent-like, the quicker thinking Motorola, HTC, Samsung, Acer, Dell and even SonyEricsson have decided to hitch a ride with the Droids spaceships, it will be a shame if Nokia can't be like the dolphins and find its own way off.

As for the apple bulldozer, I'm sure they are focused squarely on that house they just demolished and thinking to themselves why anyone had thought that house was so impressive or maybe they are thinking that perhaps they do need to look over their shoulder and just up a bit...