I've gone from Nokia to Sony Ericsson... back to Nokia... to RIM... to Apple... and now it looks like i may very well be moving on to Palm.

I got my iPhone 3G upon it's release last year and have been fairly happy with it. Early teething problems were addressed by a couple of solid firmware updates and all has been relatively well (i still use a Blackberry for email though). Anyway, i'd been looking at the Nokia N97 since my experiences with the N95 and N96 had been favourable, but it doesn't have any real standout features that would push me to abandon my Jailbroken iPhone 3G/Blackberry Bold combo.

I don't particulary have a good reason to buy a new phone, now or any time in the near future... but i'm always looking... and in looking my attention over recent months has been drawn to the upcoming Palm Pre. It looks REALLY good.



26 min walkthrough :-)

Basically it's similar to the iPhone and most of the shitty me-too devices that LG and Samsung have dumped into the market... but instead of simply trying to emulate the iPhone, Palm appear to have taken the greatest strengths in both RIM and Apples handsets and built upon it adding practical functionality like being able to run and switch between multiple apps on the fly (something i expect Apple to include in the 3.0 firmware update). It has a smaller touchscreen but the same resolution as the iPhone resulting in higher pixel density (like the Blackberry Bold and Curve) giving it a sharper picture. Also, because it has a sliding physical keyboard it means that it's not limited to half a screen like a Blackberry and the iPhone (which has an onscreen keyboard). It has similar multi-touch and gesture based features to the iPhone. The handset itself doesn't look all that special but the web-kit centred OS looks superior.

Check out Palm Pre: The full story on engadget.

Are any of you guys eyeing this think, or anything else? How many of you guys are using smartphones?

Are you still going to write software for iPhones?

Yeah, i bought a Mac Mini do enable me to do so. I'm not used to OS X and i don't like the way it does a lot of stuff. I suspect i'll write in Java and then port to C and OpenGL using Visual Studio. It's fucking tedious though. I have a complete game design document and a couple of mockups but i'm struggling to stay motivated. Mobile game development is not exactly what i want to be doing, but the potential financial rewards are rediculously appealing. Mobile game development is only going to get bigger too, and so it's not a bad place to be right now.

As a gaming platform i can see iPhone rivaling DS. Maybe not in terms of hardware units sold, but certainly on the software side of things. The AppStore is ingenious.

_Majik_

Yeah, i bought a Mac Mini do enable me to do so. I'm not used to OS X and i don't like the way it does a lot of stuff.

Just the fact that you got a mac to do ANYTHING is amazing

your making a cell phone game majik? first I've heard, how will you do this? 

I've been a member of the iPhone Developers Program for a while now. Anybody can join... for a fee... and as long as you have a Mac. There's some serious money to be made. I started work on the first one a couple of months ago. I had to buy a Mac Mini to run the SDK. It is possible to run it on a PC... but its stupidly complicated.

I'm doing something very Loaded/Reloaded-esque.