Roland Tanglao's Weblog

Don't usually play these tag games, but this will be the exception that proves the rule. My first Symbian device was the Nokia 7610 which I bought unlocked in August 2004 from a Vietnamese grey market vendor here (thanks Harry!) in Vancouver.

I bought the 7610 because of its 1 megapixel camera which was fab for its time and also because S60 was and is a platform where I knew I could get 3rd party apps and possibly develop my own. I bought the 7610 as a belated 40th birthday gift to myself (much better than a sports car :-) and much cheaper!). I was was smart enough to also buy an unlimited GPRS data plan for my phone which is no longer available in Canada and allows me to monthly use about 250 MB of data traffic photos and videos which is a lot over GPRS.

Took plenty of photos and uploaded many with HuginAndMugin (which my friend Simon wrote in Java; the Java mobile platform annoyed me back then because it couldn't take 1 megapixel photos and it annoys me now because there is a new JSR released seemingly every month and every phone has a different implementation of the Java mobile platform but I am still willing to be convinced that Java on mobile is actually a viable platform ) and via ShoZu.

Went to BloggerCon III where I spoke about HuginAndMugin at the mobile session and met Andy who later became the man behind Nokia Blogger Relations.

From there, the rest is history. N70 and then N91, N93 and N73 and many, many photos and videos taken with all of these phones. Hopefully N95 soon. Oh and I also had a Newton 2000 and one of the first Palm Pilots. I used the Newton alot and the Palm for about 3 or 4 months; never liked Palm; too simple, really ugly fonts compared to the Newton :-) and didn't meet my geeky needs!

Except for the memory problems and the user interface problems of S60v3 (both of which can be fixed or improved, more on that later in a future post), I am quite happy with Symbian and S60.

I truly believe that if the iPhone is 1/4 as usable as it appears and ships 1/2 of the units Apple expects to, then this will be great competition and cause S60's memory problems and usability to be fixed rapidly. Vive la competition!

FROM atmaspheric | endeavors » My Symbian History:

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Ok - that was probably far too long and rambling, but I suppose that’s the point of this exercise. For the next round, I will tag people from my Twitter and Jaiku contact lists and ping Matthew Miller, Roland Tanglao and Ken Camp.

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Not being a PHP Developer (but being an ex C/C++ developer for over 10 years), just a documenter/supporter/evangelist of Drupal which is a PHP website/webapp development framework whose core is very clean according to developers I respect, I can tell you that it's all about the apps!

Where is the flickr (flickr is mostly PHP with 10% Java and a bit of DHTML and flash) of Java? Where are the Drupal and Joomla and WordPress (just to cite content management) of Java? Java's great for enterprise apps developed in house which makes a lot of money for Java people now but in the areas I care about: web applications and applications that I run on my personal desktop, Java is dead.

It would have been impossible to (just to cite a few Vancouver based examples) for NowPublic, Project Opus, and Rental Monster to have been done in Java with the limited resources that they were started with. Java is just too heavyweight and hardware intensive and just not suited to incremental iterative development

Bold Prediction: key web apps and the next Microsoft, Google and Yahoo will continue to come out of PHP and its brethren of Python, Ruby, and Perl, not Java.

Bold assertion: flickrTime development is impossible in Java.

Finally, it's not a war or about vulnerability, it's about providing the coolest, most usable software to real people; and Java has failed miserably at that (maybe it'll happen on mobile phones but I am not holding my breath) and there is no sign of it starting to succeed.

From On PHP.:

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Everyone agrees on PHP's upsides: it's written for the web, it's easy to deploy and get running, and it's pretty fast. Those are important advantages. And I'm sure that it's possible to write clean, comprehensible, maintainable, PHP; only apparently it's real easy not to. But PHP has competition, most obviously Rails; and don't write the Java EE crowd off, they're not stupid at all and they're trying to learn the lessons that PHP is trying to teach. So PHP has earned everyone's respect by getting where it is, and Sun should reach out to it more than we have. But in the big picture, it feels vulnerable to me.

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