In the last couple of months I wrote posts about developers’ sites around the planet. I mostly wrote of updates or new sites that I found. Today I’m talking about a developers’ site that has been around for quite a few years, at least 3 or 4, I’d say. The site I’m going to talk today is MOTODEV, by Motorola.
While it’s been around for a long time and I have known it for a long time, I hadn’t felt like talking about it, yet. Why? Because there’s not much to say. Why? Because there’s nothing interesting to read or download!
Info about WAP capabilities is reduced to the VERY minimum and by minimum I mean that on most device spec pages (and files) you get something like “WAP 1.0” or “WAP 2.0”. Links generally target to OMA’s homepage or even the WAPForum’s.
Multimedia is sometimes described with very generic terms such as MP3-support, but nothing about other formats.
In general you can’t find accessory information about e-mail client, MMS (other than “supported”), messaging, IM.
The site in general is very poor.
Many devices are missing.
Downloadable spec files are generally a PDF version of the web page you were reading. 99% useless considering that you could save-to-file the page you’re reading.
Only thing that is decent on the site are specifications about J2ME capabilities, API’s and so on. This is decent, but not all devices have the documents available.
My overall vote to the site 4 out of ten and only because there’s J2ME information, otherwise it would have been a 2.
Something that clearly demonstrates the quality of the site. I tried to update my profile as it’s outdates, this is the result:
While writing this post I browsed the site looking for examples and re-check what exactly is available. The site has slightly changed the layout and some extra information has appeared. Looking at the device spec of the Motorola RAZR V3 we can now see the browser vendor that was not available in the past. As pointed out before, resources about J2ME are decent. The rest is mostly very similar to the end-user site, information about the generic support of SMS, EMS, MMS and IM. What IM, for example? OMA’s? AIM? ICQ? I have a V3 and I know it’s OMA IMPS (or Wireless Village), but data is still lacking.
I can see for example another V3 with CLDC 1.1, how do I distinguish the two models?
What I find disappointing in general is that all around the site there are very few details and it seems like the Motorola devices are 100% adherent to the standards and all the links are to the official documentation, while we all know that this is not entirely true, that all devices and implementations have their own peculiarities and in most cases this will not even put in evidence extra features the devices might have. Something you should actually put in the spotlight if you want developers and content providers to be able to provide the best for your devices.
I have to admit I have seen a slight improvement in the site and see new filters to search for devices that were not available 10-15 days ago when I had to do some research on them. Two weeks ago, in the handsets page there was a filter only by year. Now that filter is gone and new ones, more detailed and more interesting for a developer are present.
Related links:
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