I installed the Nokia Developers Suite for J2ME today and was able to get the Nokia Series 60 Emulator up and running a MIDlet I’ve been working on for the last couple weeks, which you can see at the right. The Series 60 SDK, still in beta (version .3 as I understand it) supports both Windows & Linux and can integrate with Borland JBuilder Mobile Edition, Sun ONE Studio and the Sun J2ME Wireless Toolkit, which I’m using.

I haven’t been able to hack with the Nokia UI package yet, but apparently it gives you the ability to control lighting and vibration from the com.nokia.mid.ui package… Lots of MIDP 2.0 specific stuff, which doesn’t help me as I’m using the 3650 (which is stuck on MIDP 1.0). I don’t see anything about being able to control the camera (although I guess that’s specific to the phone and not Series 60). More later on the toolkit.

One of the difficulties with J2ME is that while a J2ME app will hypothetically run on almost any J2ME compatible device, not all devices map the same button to the same Command. For instance, as I’ve been working on this app, I’ll create 2 buttons. On the WTK Emulator, I’ll see the two buttons next to each other, when I deploy the same app to my phone via Bluetooth, I get a menu selection with 2 options. In the listening I’ve done on KVM-Interest, it looks like can do one of three things: a) develop your application for a specific phone, b) don’t worry about where the buttons show up on each device, or c) develop your own custom UI components, rather than using the MIDP 1.0 UI components. I need to download and use more MIDP apps to find out what the majority of people do, although I’d be interested in hearing what you have to say!