Hi I am considering my next phone purchace and saw the n900, I want to get into the game industry if I can and thought that designing my own games in my spare time might help me do this.

Is maemo a good platform for game developemnt on a mobile phone?

What programming languages are supported on maemo? are there any graphics tools out there to help in game development wether 2d or 3d?

is there a better platform to choose ? windows mobile, s60, palmos, android? (not osx i refuse to buy an iphone)

what would be ideal would be if the language and libraries were semi supported on both the phone and a desktop counterpart i.e. so I could first make the app for the desktop and then convert to work on the phone(if thats a good way to do it)

your help is really appreciated

The hardware is very powerful, you have accelerated 3D graphics, and the devices have accelerometers for iPhone-style game controls. Only drawback for some kind of games could be that the touchscreen is not capable of multi-touch.

The most common languages on Maemo are C, C++, and Python. I think you can assume that Java will never be supported by Nokia on the platform. But unsupported 3rd party implementations will certainly be available at some point, most likely based on free Java implementations and without utilizing the Java-acceleration features of the ARM CPU.


Maemo phones are not yet available so it is hard to say how successful they will be. Android as a wide-spread platform is certainly tempting.

This is what Maemo is about. Maemo is basically desktop Linux in your pocket. Many stuff runs unaltered after simply recompiling (not optimized for the screen size and touch screen, though).

Thanks for the info you have pretty much answered all my questions, I do like the idea of the n900 and maemo and the fact that i havent seen a good enough android phone makes me want this more.

one other question though what would be the best approach to making games that would give the easiest port to other devices?

can I compile c++ python code to run on android? s60? the biggest difference I would assume would be the display portion of the code which I assume would have to be written for each device, is this so?

will there be examples on any of the platforms on how to make use of the built in graphics accellerators?