Nokia 6120
I finally got around to getting myself a new mobile phone, as it looks like the Android phones may take a while to arrive here in Europe, unlocked, and my old phone was fading.
I ended up selecting a Nokia 6120 in order to get something that runs Symbian, which has a decent amount of apps above and beyond the Java ME stuff.
So far, I'm fairly happy with the phone. Here are some notes:
It's small and light. Nice!
It runs Java ME (J2ME) applications surprisingly slowly. I'm non-plussed by this. And no, it's not just Hecl, even ShopList, which is quite simple and small (~ 6K), takes several seconds to start up. This is not appreciably faster than on my cheap phone from several years ago.
My old, cruddy phone was able to recharge (slowly) via USB. This one doesn't, as far as I can tell.
I bought it from Amazon.de, and the bozos who were the 'real' sellers sold me a phone intended for the polish market, meaning the dictionary languages installed are all eastern European - no Italian, which I need. Not the phone's fault though, and I guess it's probably possible to replace that stuff.
The camera has some weird issues where it leaves streaks. I realize that it's only a phone camera, but it ought to be able to do better. Here's an image from my recent trip to Oslo, by way of example:
Creating videos wors pretty well though.
Playing video is just a bit jerky - it mostly keeps up, but not 100% of the time, when you lose a few frames.
Nokia ought to do a better job making sure that it's integrated with Linux (Ubuntu in my case). That said, things work quite well, by and large, and I was able to get things done with relatively little fiddling.
The amount of progress over a few years is very impressive. This phone completely blows my old phone out of the water. Sure, it's a bit pricier, but it's way more capable.
All in all, I'm happy with it, but I think that my next phone will be some kind of Android-based device, as that system is way more hackable than Java ME, and the people developing it seem to 'get it' a bit more.
That said, I'm glad I got it - I needed something modern to play with Hecl on, and hopefully I will be able to work on using some of the fancier bits of the phone from Hecl.
Oh, and by the way, I'm always on the lookout for phones to try Hecl with - even if they're old and worn out, the only thing that matters is that they are able to run Java ME applications. Contact me for shipping information:-)
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about 7 hours later:
Get an OpenMoko! BTW, you might want to package Hecl/etc for Debian so people running Debian (or Maemo) on their phones/internet tablets can use it.
1 day later:
There is a USB charger for nokia phones if you're desperate. You should be able to find one at a suitable store, or check nokia's website. I bought mine from a local store. It wasn't cheap though, at around the equivalent of 30USD, but then, stuff like this isn't usually cheap in my country.
On the java thing, I find Java to be generally slow to launch, not just on phones. I come across quite a lot of Java EE apps, and my instincts tell me to just prefer PHP (despite all the hatred that people have for it). Even on my E51, with decent oomph, the apps are still slow. I think the problem is the layers of emulation, but what do I know?
2 days later:
Yeah, I saw the USB charger at the store, but that sort of defeats the purpose. USB itself should be sufficient, given enough time, to charge the device, as it was with my crufty old Nokia 3100. That means one less cable to carry on trips.
In terms of Java ME, it should be a lot faster to launch, because it's really a pretty small, simple environment, which is one of the reasons I like it. Especially in the older devices, there were enough resource constraints that there just wasn't any room for "architecture astronaut" kinds of designs.
In terms of web stuff, I prefer Ruby on Rails: it's a nice, clean, efficient way of doing things, yet it's also fast to write, so it really is the best of both worlds. I have spent too much time with other people's hideous PHP code to really want to work with it again, and huge, "enterprisey" J2EE applications don't appeal to me much either.