Developing for Nokia Asha

August 1st, 2013, 13:45 Posted By: wraggster

Nokia started a Premium Developer Program for Nokia Asha phones http://developer.nokia.com/Developer..._program.xhtml Where you can get a free Asha phone, if you publish at least one app at Nokia store for Asha in the next 6 moths. I was curious about Asha development, and since they offered a free phone for it I couldn’t resist the offer. So here’s a short summary of my experiences with Nokia’s Asha SDK.

I got Nokia Asha 310 from the developer program, so I wanted to keep that as a primary device, and support the new Asha 501. Luckily the apps written with the Nokia Series 40 Developer SDK 2.0 are compatible with the new Asha 501. You just need to support the lower resolution of Asha 501, and that’s it. I’m now targeting the S40 full touch Asha phones with resolution of 240×400 and the new Nokia Asha phones with the resolution of 240×320.

IDE

The IDE is build on top of Eclipse, so it feels familiar to any Eclipse user. (Carbide). It has basic project templates etc. so you’ll get a pretty nice project created by creating a new J2ME project from the IDE. However the default template doesn’t give your app a default icon, and it doesn’t set any icons into the manifest file. This is a big headache for Asha noobies, since you can not install the app into the phone if it’s missing the icon & definitions in the manifest file. However you can debug and run your application on the emulator without these, so it’s really confusing.

Now-days every single SDK adds icons and does all the packing magic to the new projects, so you can run your hello world application on a phone, by just pressing run. Just see Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone SDKs. This is definitely something that Nokia should fix.

On Device Debugging

This one was really hard to get working. You can download all the tools needed from Nokia developer website: http://developer.nokia.com/Develop/a...ice_Debugging/ However I never managed to get the Debugging working though Bluetooth connection, so I had to use the USB cable for debugging. The biggest issue for me with the debugging was the project created just didn’t start with my new project. Later on I learned that I must have an icon for the app before I can install it to the phone ( I whined about this already in the IDE chapter).

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