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Comment by lallysingh | Hacker News Reader

1) I don't think Nokia has much of a choice if they're going to be in the smartphone market.

2) Programatically, they've got Qt now, which is easily comparable to Cocoa, and doesn't require devs to learn a new programming language.

I haven't looked at android's, nor have I heard any commentary, which usually isn't a good indicator.

Out of the 3 (or 5, +palm +msft), it's going to come down to device/network/developer relations. This market's still pretty open, and nobody's really doing a great job on #3 yet.

Then again, I'm wondering if the portable app market's nearly as important as is commonly thought; perhaps the web really has changed this game permanently.

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Android uses Java (well, underneath it isn't really Java, but that's mostly besides the point). You get a lot of standard Java stuff, and use Android-specific stuff for the UI.

It's a decent environment, is easy to get set up and get going, and works on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

The Google guys definitely 'get' how to push their stuff - from day 1, they have had a bunch of guys on #android on Freenode to help people out and answer questions.

Qt is supposed to be pretty nice (I've never used it though), and C++ is certainly popular, but both will require some adaptation to the mobile phone world, and that will take time.

C++ was the mobile phone world, at least before Apple came into the scene and Objective-C took its share of the market.

Qt has been running on mobile oses for a few years.

Err... [citation needed]? C++ is definitely used out there - that's what Symbian apps are written with. However, there is also a lot of J2ME (Java) code out there as well. J2ME runs on a huge number of devices, and is actually not that bad a platform, considering its age; just that things like Android and iPhone are much better.

I'll bite.

From the bottom of the summary here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian#integrated_Symbian_plat...

We get: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/08/21/canalys_iphone...

Symbian OS had 50% of the smartphone market as of August 2009. And 50% of the market in that dataset is a majority - probably a good enough a citation for "C++ was the mobile world" when you consider what that would have looked like before the iPhone.

The majority of phones out there that are not "smart phones" and are quite programmable, via J2ME. Also, Symbian OS doesn't necessarily mean that you have to write in C++, as they run J2ME as well. You do get better results and more integration with the C++ API, but it's apparently quite a pain in the ass to use.

For some reason, people here seem to think that iPhones and other fancy devices are all there is out there.

I originally wrote Hecl to run on a Nokia 3100, which came out something like 5+ years ago, and was certainly not top of the line then (it was about 100 euros, IIRC).

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