On Sunday 28 November 2010 12:50 PM, Raja Subramanian wrote:
On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 12:16 AM, Shrinivasan T<[email protected]>  wrote:
Will the time spent on python with nokia symbian is worth?
In my opinion it's not worth spending any time on Symbian, let
alone PyS60.

+1. I've been messing around with Android for the past one year, and it's been a rewarding experience. It's so good to see Android phones popping up in friends/acquaintances hands and they declare "dude, I got an Android phone!". Most of them, even non-techies have a fair bit of idea that it's an "open source mobile OS from Google" (let's face it, Google's brand name did feature in that buying decision too).

The phones are getting cheaper every 3 months or so, and you can do a fair bit of Android programming without owning one, actually - it has really good emulators (which you can try different screen sizes/aspect ratios resolutions). I'm sure you saw Samsung Galaxy Tab ads in the TV networks, so it's only going to get better.

There are some criticisms of Android of course - that it's not "true foss" - the reason being Google not doing the framework development in the open, and it does a "code drop" with every release. (Read this for context: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/06/froyo-code-drop.html). But Google afaik claims they need that time to negotiate features and technology issues with various partners in the OHA (http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/). On which I'm willing to give Google a pass, because the framework and the tool chain is so awesome. Also because despite of existence of frameworks like OpenMoko (and the more recent Meego/Moblin), Google has been the only company that had enough momentum (money and open source chops) to bring a foss alternative to mass-produced phones.

Not to mention the really great modding community out there - I have a fairly old phone, the G1/ADP1 which in Android terms is almost over the hill (HTC stopped releasing official updates after 1.6). But thanks to Cyanogen (http://www.cyanogenmod.com/) I run the latest Froyo (2.2). Of course, there's also the veritable XDA-Developers who keep doing awesome work in this front. So I suggest you give Android a shot - even if you don't have a phone - and you just might end up liking it. As for Python, there's ASE (http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/) if you give that a read, you'll see that it indeed has great support on Android.

Vamsee.

P.S: Sorry if I sounded like a Google fanboy - Android is one of the reasons I still like the company - I've been pretty impressed with their work so far. I've been tempted to try iOS toolset, but I really don't like Apple's attitude towards 3rd party developers. And as for Intel/Nokia's meego, it's an interesting OS for sure, but almost no momentum when it comes to community (or variety of devices for that matter).
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