The Smartphone Arena

Hmms interesting developments are afoot at the moment. The Register have reported on an Open Sourcing of the OPL dev language for Symbian devices, which is a definate boon for hobby developers. Also there are polls from Carphone Warehouse that rate the Orange SPV as worst phone out at the moment, along side research that reckons that WinCE will take off like wildfire in the smartphone market...

Far be it from me to think that some of these people talk utter bollox, but at the mo M$ needs to pull something huge out of the bag to go from bottom to top in the space of a few years as quoted in this report at El Reg.

As for OPL, currently Java is leading the way in the cheap and cheerful smartphone app development area, unfortunately this is an awfully complex language in comparison to OPL which will enable beginner programmers the chance to make apps in the style currently being thrown about by Java programmers. Let us not forget that some of the best games of all time originated from hobby coders, who can forget the incredible "Grandad and the Quest for the Holey Vest" and also "Grandad in the search of the sandwiches". Harking back to my Atari gaming days, half of my favourite games were shareware/freeware and in some cases some off the wall ideas were thought up as well as good twists on existing games. Lets hope something of these old ways can come to Symbian devices.