Taming the Robot: WPhone on Android
So, I was getting all geared up to start taking on the challenge of fully supporting the rich interface on the Android platform, the same way we do on the iPhone/iPod Touch. Android sporting a WebKit browser by default and calling for a minimum of a 200MHz ARM 9 processor, there really should be no reason not to.
But now having found the time to download the cross-platform SDK and trying it on my development sandbox, I’ll venture to say that it might just be a bit easier than I thought. :-)
Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t call it 100% functional quite yet, especially if you’re emulating a device without a touch screen (keypad nav), but it’s not bad at all for a start. Everything is mostly working: navigation, forms, effects, etc. From what I’ve been able to see, all of the required tweaks reside at the CSS level, as well as Javascript (although less so).
This sure gives me hope for supporting the same rich interface on Nokia’s S60WebKit browser for their Linux and hopefully Symbian devices.
The future is bright indeed. But the present it quite shiny on its own!
