Hey Reinier, thanks for your very very long answer. Again a lot of things are more clear to me and I also agree in many points with you.
Still there is a point that I have to clarify. When I say that we want to develop for a mobile platform, it does not mean that we want to hack it or program low level stuff (like kernel developing or so). It just means that we develop an application with a certain pedagogical value (not in the meaning of learning eg. maths or geographic on the phone, but more as a collaborative platform to work with others and also with an application on the desktop). So how does it work for us: We have an idea of an app, that can be used either within a school (yes, there are scenarios for mobiles within a classroom) or in the field (the field is quite tricky because of the connectivity and data plans are still expensive in Germany). So we design the app, develop and test it on the phone and then we have some few (e.g. 10 devices) here at the university, deploy the app, go to the school and run the scenario with the students and the teacher. After that or additional runs we do an evaluation with the students and then in the end, if everything was successful we write a research paper about that. In the end the app is further developed and improved and so on but - at least for us - we do not develop for the market. So all the arguments with the app store are of course valid if you want to make profit our just want to have your app being used by many people, but this is not the game for us. This is why we were quite happy with out 10 Dell WM PDAs: Idea->Develop->Deploy->Run->Evaluate- >... So if we want to map this to the iPhone or to Android we have the following choices: iPhone: * Develop, buy 100$ App Store licence, deliver to AppStore, install on iPhones for class * Develop, package for Cydia, create own repository, install on jailbroken iPhones for class Android: * Develop, deliver to Android Market, install on G1s * Develop, put *.apk file to our university server, enable installation for 3rd party apk's, install on G1s So for me the last option is the most attractive one. So this is also the way we will go first. I have ordered one German T-Mobile G1 that will hopefully arrive soon, so I can do first testing. Still the registration thing and the very tight coupling to Google sucks. And as far as I have seen, it is not easy at all to exchange the OS of the German G1s. For the US ones there was this telnetd hack, which has been fixed in the latest versions of the firmware. So again, the G1 is almost as closed as the iPhone (except the fact that you can easily install 3rd party *.apk apps. Cheers and thanks for this very interesting conversation! Adam --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to javaposse@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to javaposse+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
