A panoply of cellphones
I currently have four cellphones (plus my own) strewn out over my desk for debugging purposes (as well as a GSM modem plugged into my computer). I hope all those scare stories about cellphones irradiating your brain are not true!
I am beginning to think that the most time-consuming part of the cellphone app development will be testing it on all the devices we plan to deploy on. CRS are keen to use Windows Mobile devices, so that's a key target platform (which is interesting because that seems to be the only platform which currently supports CLDP1.1).
We'd also like to see it running on lower-end phones so that at least a limited subset of the functionality can be deployed to many more people. One of the issues they have at the moment is that while many of their on-the-ground agents have access to Internet-capable PDAs and laptops, they are often some distance away from where they are needed. If we can deploy our app on a $30 cellphone, it will be economical to have someone in each village who can rapidly report to CRS as requrired.
In front of me I have a Sprint Windows Mobile smartphone, a Nokia N82, a Pantech something-or-other, a Nokia 2610 and my erstwhile Sony Ericsson Z530i. I figure if I can get my app running on all of these it will probably run anywhere! I won't go into too many details - but let's just say that between odd multithreading issues on Windows Mobile and an entirely broken UI library on my Z530i there are going to be a few long nights getting everything working before next Thursday.
In happier news, my visa has been granted. I'm going to collect it tomorrow (uhh...today) and I should be flying out on Thursday evening. I'm looking forward to seeing the conditions where our solutions is going to be used, and demoing our prototype to the people who will be using it in anger.
I'm also hoping to get a sense of CRS's IT infrastructure so we can be sure to fit in with it. They are currently an entirely .NET shop (which may well be why they want to use Windows Mobile) but we hope to convince them that it makes sense to use Java for mobile development, because it means they'll be able to deploy it widely at a much lower cost. We absolutely don't want to change the way they are doing things right now, but as they don't have any mobile development going on right now it makes sense for them to evaluate the alternatives before committing to a technology.
Hmm, long post - time for bed!
- Login to post comments
