Re:Ask HN: What's the best phone to write an app for for Lin...
by regularfry on Sunday November 21, 2010 @10:09AM
(#1927155)
Right now? Nokia N900, without a doubt. Maemo is a lightly hacked Debian, the official toolchain is gcc-arm (admittedly without autoconf, but that's a blessing if you're in control of your own source), and deployment is straight-up apt. Plus it's a decent Python dev platform if your tendencies veer in that direction.
If the "lightly hacked" part gets in the way, you can even debootstrap a real Debian release onto the device and develop in that.
The hardware is decent as well; it certainly feels more solid than the HTC slide phones I've played with recently, and despite dropping it a few times it's barely got the shine worn off after 8 months.
All that being said, it's entirely unclear what the future of the platform is; Meego could sink without a trace in 6 months, and I don't know if Nokia are planning a successor device. In my mind they'd be insane not to, but sanity hasn't been Nokia's hallmark of late.
If the "lightly hacked" part gets in the way, you can even debootstrap a real Debian release onto the device and develop in that.
The hardware is decent as well; it certainly feels more solid than the HTC slide phones I've played with recently, and despite dropping it a few times it's barely got the shine worn off after 8 months.
All that being said, it's entirely unclear what the future of the platform is; Meego could sink without a trace in 6 months, and I don't know if Nokia are planning a successor device. In my mind they'd be insane not to, but sanity hasn't been Nokia's hallmark of late.