d2r: a pim for mobiles

a pim for mobiles

With mobile phones becoming more feature-rich (for the first time really beginning to hold their own against PDAs), Russ suggested that spaces (for example) could find a good niche as the "palm desktop for phones." It's a cool idea. I've been looking at the Symbian developer/SDKs website again (The first time I looked at it was when I was at IBM Research). Sadly, the dev kits area is a mess, there seems to be a different SDK for each phone and the link provided for Nokia phones is broken. Oh well.

In case writing code for the device itself is needed (if the SDK is properly designed, synchronization shouldn't require that, right?), I own a symbian-based device (the excellent Psion Series 7, now discontinued), which might make it easy to try Java code on a Symbian OS. Going from the Series 7 to a Symbian-based phone might be easier than from the emulator. Lots of things to learn.

Later: here is the link for the Nokia J2ME toolkit, download, and here is the link to Sun's J2ME toolkit page, which may also come in handy.

Categories: technology
Posted by diego on January 15 2003 at 11:48 PM

Comments (please see the comments & trackback policy).

Don't worry about Java on the phones at all (j2me is low-powered and limited), just about SyncML and maybe Bluetooth. Check out this Sync4J homepage: http://sync4j.sourceforge.net/web/theproject.html could you incorporate something like that into your app?

If I understand the tech correctly, when you get Bluetooth installed, it just listens on a com port just like any other serial port connection. There's a Java API for Bluetooth already. Then your phone and your app talk via SyncML - just like the iApps do on the Mac.

The J2ME stuff is just for small Over The Air apps and aren't for daily app use (IMHO). The Symbian phones already have basic Email, To Do, Calendaring and Contacts as well as little extras like notes, photos and sound recordings. What I'm envisioning is that your app synch with these built-in features using the built-in SyncML support (which includes iCal and vCard among other specs).

OOh... You could have multiple devices, and each device could be contained in it's own Space. ooooh.

-Russ

Posted by: Russ at January 16, 2003 1:24 AM

A little searching and I came up with this company who's doing something similar. They've even got a Java PIM client available via Web Start that syncs with their servers.

http://www.calmeno.de/html/demos.html

I signed up for the demo and synced with the servers via my phone and it worked perfectly. (And after I realized I had just given some random company all my personal contact info... doh!)

Anyways, they want a centralized model, but I was thinking of a localized one like the Palm Desktop. Heard of the "Missing Manuals" series of books? Spaces could be the "Missing PIM" for intelliphones. ;-)

-Russ

Posted by: Russ at January 16, 2003 2:12 AM