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nokia releases midp2.0 SDK for series 80

nokia recently announced that it would be following up the release of it's first symbian series 80 device, the nokia communicator with the nokia 9500. it's planned for Q4 04 and could be the first device to feature EDGE, wi-fi, and bluetooth all on the same device. the specs look great except for using an MMC card instead of SDIO. hello? 128 MB limit? still time to change that? please?

the first commuinicator was a huge brick, yet still a cool device. unfortunately it was useless because it hit the market TOO soon, and lacked GPRS, so all connectivity was through CSD dialup at about 9kbps. I had one of these back in the day, but coudn't really use it because of that limitation. the one time i visited nokia to do an MMSC interoperability test, everyone in their GSM group in dallas seemed to have one of these, so if you ever see sales numbers for the communicator, make sure to subtract the number of people working in las colinas. an interesting place. half the people in that office are texans, half the people are finns. talk about culture clash. i wonder if many sauna deals go down there. i digress.

the series 80 MIDP SDK supports the MIDP 2.0 spec, and is more than just a new skin on the old nokia java SDK. the setup supports some pretty complex networking, testing of the messaging (WMA 1.1, JSR-120) and bluetooth APIs (JSR-81), the mobile media APIs (JSR-135), the FileConnection APIs (JSR-75), the Nokia UI extension API, and of course running the core MIDP 2.0 class libraries as well.

running our MIDP 2.0 RSS Feed Reader unmodified seemed to work fine in the emulator, although I could see re-working some of the presentation for this class of device. for one, this device just begs for color. gotta put that on the list.

the implementation does a good job of automatically mapping your commands to the two extra softkeys in the middle on the right hand side, the rest are available via the menu button as on many other devices. keyboard navigation seems to work as one might expect. looks promising. let's hope platformRequest() works in the first release.