pouët.net

FWIW I tried some JavaScript + CSS animations ( some sort of tunnel effect ) on a Nokia 5800. It ran at 25-30 fps. The same code ran at 10 fps on an HTC whatever phone.

iPhone has nothing to do with the other phones. And if you want to watch or play stuff onit, well you're way better with an iPod touch, less expensive and much more powerful.
Nokia have a very wide range of crap and not so crap devices. but gnenerally the real pain is the case design. They're all unfriendly and uncomfortable in their own way (mostly the S60 series). The nGage was funny and nGage2 is just a bad joke.
Sony Ericsson are generally good. SE K800i is good enough for a java machine.

I'd look forward to the Android tho, but i haven't seen any yet.

...or you could grab a Pandora and install some voip software on it ?

What?

parapete: I kinda have something with OMAP3 floating around, due to NDAs and crap I can't speak further but it is frigging cool.

yeah. why not a pandora? except that there's no phone functionality... ;)

Decipher, me too ;)

Sharp (at least I think it was them) has an upcoming phone that seems pretty neat in terms of CPU/GPU power. Not sure how well it works as a phone, though. And the unit itself is kind of clunky.

Sorries in the skies.

okkie: as strange as it can seem yes, the iPod Touch is a big thinner, and more capable than the iPhone. for example when we test our game it runs at 30+ fps in iPod rather than 20 on iPhone (which quite often lures us into false hopes!)

well isn't this caused by the available memory?
on the ipod touch, you have way more memory at your disposal compared to the iphone 3g

It's probably a thread scheduling issue of some sort, since it's a phone it has to always have it's phone software running with more priority... maybe?

No, the processor (and possibly the GPU, I forget) are clocked faster.

I'd expect the ipod running at 532MHz (against the iphones 412MHz) would give a significant improvement on app performance(and perceived gpu performance if it's bottlenecked on driver overhead).

Symbian is quite shit to develop for. I'd go for the beforementioned iPhone or Android.

Let's face it, they're all shit to develop for.

Symbian - nasty dev tools, weird take on C++, no on-system debugging.
iPhone - you need a Mac and can only distribute through the app store if Apple deign to allow you.
Android - JSR 1209343903-whatever-it-is probably won't appeal to demosceners much.

are there any iPhone demos out there yet? with the new iPhone 3GS and OGL:es2 support things should look a bit more interesting for the demo maker...

not afaik, probably because you need a mac to develop for it and the distribution model is not demo-friendly. it is quite a beast of a machine though...

There ARE a couple of iphone demos, but like pete says there are some issues. There's a basic one here on pouet somewhere (can't remember the name, but it's a few months back in the "mobile phone" platform), and there's a port of Yellow Rose.

The problem (apart from needing a mac to develop on, and having to sign up as a developer and pay apple $99 if you want to do anything 'officially') is distribution really. Normally you'd just put your app on the app store, but apple rejected Yellow Rose of Texas for not being interactive at all. I.e. only interactive demos would be allowed. And you're not allowed to call it a demo too, because apple don't allow "demos", only "lite versions". Guess we'd better start calling ourselves litesceners.

So, app store seems to be out. Other options: release the source (which the other demo did). Catch: a 2gb+ sdk download, plus enough knowledge to build it are needed just to watch a demo. Then you can't install it on the phone without paying $99 to apple so you can code sign it. Not really a good option too..

Jailbroken phones: yep, you can build your app without paying the $99, you can distribute it through cydia or whatever is popular now, and people can download + watch it easily. You can also use all those private APIs apple don't want you touching, and call it a demo. Easily the best option, but not everyone jailbreaks their phone, and getting your app listed on the store used to be hard (otherwise people have to add some URL for your server in to see your stuff.. guess we could have a dedicated demoscene server somewhere pretty easily).

Couple of questions on jailbreaking, as i've not done it for a while: is it possible to dev on PC now? And has the "getting your stuff visible on the stores" thing improved much?

Well.... I like the ZXphone...because it has rubber keys and a dedicated speaker for beeps.

I love the retardation displayed above :)

Then again it is an "application store" and a demo is not an application anyway.

ring ring demoscene phone!! :D :D

What about making a Pouet.app as a distribution channels for demos? Kind of thing people do for ebooks. The only thing I'm concerned about is that demos are executable files so Apple might have some problems with that as they do with C64 emulators. Anyway I wanna try this kind ofmodel for our DMA demoscene group with next demo.

vorg: it's very likely apple will reject it, because it's against the sdk rules to run executable code from outside the app. My advice if you want it on the app store: add some minor interactivity and set it to loop. And don't mention the word demo anywhere, remember, it's a lite! :)