It is amazing what one can learn via IRC and a Jim Hughes proxy about a new phone. Someone from Sendo showed up at the All About Symbian/Mobitopia pub meet this evening in the UK. I learned quite a lot.
They’re not using MIDP 2.0. They don’t think that it’s stable enough. That’s pretty big thing considering that the Sendo X is a brand new phone. Sendo seems to be making a lot of interesting decisions like this, and I’m inclined to believe that they are making the correct ones. Luckily for J2ME developers, Sendo has included many JSR’s to their MIDP implementation, which brings the usefulness of J2ME on the Sendo X well beyond a stock Series 60 device. Yes, I’m told that our good buddy JSR-82 (Bluetooth) is among the bunch.
So from a programmer/platform, the Sendo is in a unique position. It is a spanking new Series 60 phone to the market. It comes from a company known for their solid lower end phones. It has MIDP 1.0 but lots of extra goodies. It has that XML-based Now! screen. It can accept an SD card! (praise be to the engineer(s) who is/are repsonsible for that one!)
All of this is coming from a relatively small company (read: agile) that has what it takes but lacks brand recognition. These are interesting times for Series 60.
It is also quite interesting to see the definition of Series 60 broaden and broaden. We’ve got Series 60 running on multiple versions of Symbian OS, with varying levels of capability (7650 to 6600 to the forthcoming SX-1), and various stages of product lifecycle.
I still keep coming back to their decision to use MIDP 1.0 rather than the up-and-coming MIDP 2.0. Is MIDP 2.0 really that unstable? As long as Sendo includes a few critical JSRs, they should be just fine (and pretty much equivalent to MIDP 2.0). I’m sure this is unrelated, but Russ is having a helluva time getting Java stuff to run on his 6600.
Hmm…