DISQUS

Hi Alex,

1) Everything is done in Java. S60 is at the upper end of Java performance, but by no means the best - it looks this slick on pretty much any feature phone, and there's remarkably little degradation going back to old-school S40s like the 7210 (though obviously we can't make the screen bigger!). Graphics are all handled with minimal effort using our app framework.

2) As you say, SMS fallback helps when inside the app (and specifically, is much less error prone than Java network settings, which is one of its key advantages - another is the cost when roaming). If the user has no wap settings at all (rare these days, but possible) then obviously there's no ticketing solution which could work except pure-SMS picture messaging (MMS requires network settings to work). SMS picture messages are extremely limited in size and can't handle, for example, proper secure tickets like the new UK rail ticketing standard - or any barcode holding more than trivial payload.

In practice network settings haven't turned out to be a huge barrier for SMS-fallback enabled apps, but there is plenty that handset manufacturers can (must!) fix to improve the installation experience and plenty operators must do to improve the provisioning of settings, so we don't have to go finding workarounds.

Cheers,

Tom, CTO Masabi

Would rather depend on what development platform he used...

If the app really works on S40, then it must be Java and so should be relatively portable, especially to Sony-Ericsson. If it is actually Symbian (and so not able to run on S40), he's in trouble - basically it would need a ground up rewrite.

Most Windows Mobile devices do have JVMs these days, but there are about five different JVMs in active use and the integration into the OS isn't great. For a budget port Java is easiest, but for proper integration you need to code natively. Windows Mobile is still a very small percentage of shipped devices so it's worth checking how big the market is before attempting that.