hi,

Without actually using a nokia phone, I am interested in knowing exactly how close I can estimate the run time of an application developed for one of these nokia phones (e.g. N900).

Suppose the application is developed using maemo sdk and then cross-compiled for ARM. It is then run on a laptop using QEMU. Would that give me the closest estimate for the run time of the application if it was actually run on a N900?

Any other ideas about how to get a closer estimate?

thanxs

Using scratchbox and Xephyr as used in the Maemo SDK will give you almost the exact UX that you'd have on the device. If you're developing in Qt, you can use the simulator in the Nokia Qt SDK. But scratchbox + xephyr is a much better in the realism sense than the Qt device simulator.

run time as in time needed to complete processing something?

Run time as in how long until it drains battery?

Qemu will run stuff as fast as your pc is able to run it, so it's not a measure at all. Powertop and similar tools can e used to make sure the app is well behaved in general, ut you wont get a battery estimate.

> '...If you're developing in Qt,...'
I intend to develop in C

> 'Run time as in time needed to complete processing something?...'
yes

How about using Softgun (http://softgun.sourceforge.net/) or SkyEye (http://www.skyeye.org/index.shtml)? Anyone with experience in these ARM emulators?

Also note that if you do plenty of disk I/O among your processing then that might very well be a major bottleneck; standard flash memory is slow (fast SSDs use 1. different kind of memory 2. various tricks to parallelize access).