I have previously published an Android vs IPhone comparison and many people requested that I do a comparison of Android vs iPhone vs Nokia vs BlackBerry vs Windows Mobile 7. So here goes.

Android

• open platform http://source.android.com
• can compile custom firmwares - good for hackers and other
• good framework, extended on each new firmware
• supports multitasking
• nice IDE - Eclipse, NetBeans
• development SDK is free
• easy to debug, can send logs to developers
• programming language is Java but bridges from other languages exist (C# .net - Mono, etc)
• Java is a high level language that appeared in 1995. Android supports Java 1.5 and translates the byte code to its own custom Dalvik byte code optimized for mobile devices.
• for the hardcore programmers, Android offers the possibility of programming in C using the native dev kit NDK
• can run script languages like LUA, Perl, Python, etc
• can install third party applications from sdcard, random sites - not locked to a specific market
• applications can hook and override everything - email interface, SMS sending, custom keyboards, etc
• supports widgets
• can publish applications on the Android market instantly - initial one time registration fee is 25E
• user has access to the sdcard and can use it as a USB disk
• no Adobe Flash support yet. Probably will be available in Q2 of this year.

iPhone

• closed platform
• no multitasking except for some Apple applications. multitasking is probably going to be introduced in the next vertion of the iPhone, the iPhone 4
• development kit costs ~90E
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A few days ago I found another rare BlackBerry bug. I was playing with some list elements and everything was working fine until I ran the code on a BlackBerry Curve 8300.

I was suddenly presented with this popup.



I have never seen this error so I googled for it. Unfortunately there was no reasonable explanation. So I decided to investigate it.
First thing I did was to take a peek at the event log. I did it by pressing ALT+L+G+L+G and I got this.



Taking a look at the exception trace showed this.



I needed to see the full log for details, so I used

javaloader -u eventlog

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Some time ago I found an interesting “feature” on the BlackBerry emulator.
It seems under special conditions we get some funny messages.

Luckily I was able to reproduce the behavior and here are the steps, the screens and the funny messages.

1. Run clean.bat in C:\eclipse_g_341_jde7\plugins\net.rim.eide.componentpack4.6.0_4.6.0.16\components\simulator\
or skip this but make sure the Contacts list is empty.

2. Copy my application to the simulator folder.

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