Beginning Sony Ericsson mobile phone programming. Where to start?

November 24, 2009 8:30 PM

Beginning Sony Ericsson mobile phone programming. Where to start?

I recently picked-up an unlocked Sony Ericsson K850i to replace my poor drowned iPhone and am finding it be superior in almost every way except one very important one: 3rd party applications.

I would love to have something like OmniFocus that would allow me to sync tasks with my Google calendar. Also, the built-in email client is pretty terrible in that it only allows you to connect to one account at a time. I can't be the only person to have taken a look at the offerings currently available and participated in a communal facepalm.

I've done some preliminary Google searching in regards to J2ME programming, I'm finding a serious lack of decent applications for my phone and I think it would be beneficial to work on a project that I would use on a daily basis.

So; has anyone dabbled in J2ME programming? If so, were there any tutorials in particular that explained the process in terms that a beginner could understand?

(Also; the previously discussed topics are pretty old. Are they still relevant?)

posted by tmt to computers & internet (4 comments total)

I wrote some J2ME apps for my blackberry when I first got it. The only difference between J2ME and J2SE is that your standard library is smaller. Much smaller.
posted by b1tr0t at 8:37 PM on November 24, 2009

I've also dabbled in J2ME. The other difference is that your platform is slower and has a seriously constrained UI. But, it's fun to write something that runs on your phone.
posted by hattifattener at 9:56 PM on November 24, 2009

J2ME is super easy to learn. The quirkiness comes from discovering how the specific phone / platform / OS integrates the various J2ME APIs. Many phones won't support many features. From what I recall, your specific SE phone has pretty good J2ME support. If you just want to do email and calendar syncing, you can probably pull that off with a certain level of effort.

There's a lot of J2ME resources online. Here are some links I found helpful when I was learning this stuff (trimmed a lot of links out of here that were really old, I guess that was a while ago):

* http://www.microemu.org/
* http://bellsouthpwp.net/m/c/mcpierce/javamefaq.html
* http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2005/05/03/midletUI.html?page=last
posted by doteatop at 8:03 AM on November 25, 2009

Thanks for the great answers. You've given me a bit to think about. Undaunted, I will J2ME on and on...
posted by tmt at 4:40 PM on November 25, 2009