Development for functional phones and fragmentation between suppliers, networks, countries

Question

I am interested in developing applications for phones with features, since a large percentage of mobile phones are feature phones in both developed and developing countries. I read about fragmentation issues caused by various phone features in the market.

I have a few questions:

1. What development tools do I need if I want to develop functions for the majority of various phones in the world market?

(I read about special tools like Nokia and Samsung devices, and I also read about Java ME SDK 3.0, but I don’t know which ones should be used in which situations.)

2. What fragmentation problems will I encounter with all providers (such as Nokia and Samsung) in different networks (for example, Sprint and T-mobile) and in different countries (for example, in devices and networks in India)?

(I read that vendors can provide additional APIs for their phones that are not available on other phones. I think I also read somewhere that some networks may not allow third-party applications to download.)

3. I read that in some markets there are many manufacturers of high-quality Chinese and Indian phones. I don’t think I can use my vendor-specific tools for developing applications for my phones due to problems with the language barrier. Would it be better to use common tools like Java ME SDK 3.0?

In fact, I am interested in developing for emerging markets such as India, China, Russia and Brazil (BRIC countries). What tools should be used when developing for these markets? And what fragmentation issues should I know?

Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

For feature phones and junior mobile devices, J2ME is the platform for using IMHO.

If you are worried about device fragmentation, I would suggest using J2ME Polish . This is a structure that is really built on top of J2ME. You can discover device capabilities, use preprocessing instructions to bypass errors on specific devices, create your own MIDlet using CSS and use ant scripts and custom resources and create procedures to ensure your application is compatible with the widest number of devices. If you are planning to develop for such a wide range of places, there is excellent Locale support for different languages.

I have been using it for a while, and I feel that it really extends what I can develop with J2ME, as it contains a large number of classes and tools that speed up development.