For a couple of weeks have I worked on a Mobile ASP.NET prototype for a customer. One interesting thing with the prototype was that it should support the BlackBerry terminal. I worked with the BlackBerry 7730. It was the first time for me to look at this phone. It's nice but I don't like the size of it. The screen especially is good, very easy to read.
Its browser application could render both "XHTML Basic" and Wml. I preferred the Wml because it is a bit faster to render.
One problem was that the Mobile ASP.NET doesn't support any of the modern BlackBerry terminals. I wonder if this is some political issue behind this. But I was lucky. I found a person that had done a device configuration for BlackBerry. Not exactly the 7730, but it was easy to modify the configuration to support this version also.
I was however a bit disappointed with the capabilities of the browser. I have programmed several hand-held devices before and thought that this browser should be rather advanced. But even if the device has a color screen I can't use colors. (Maybe I'm wrong. I hope so.) BlackBerry support Svg (scalable vector graphics) and with this I could make quite complex layouts. But Svg is not as easy to program with ASP.NET as Wml and Html is.
Comments