Steve, Seppo (Comeks CTO) and I went to the Motodev Summit on Friday. Steve and I missed the evening sessions but the morning sessions were very informative. Here's what I remember.

Christy Wyatt - Interesting keynote about Motorola's platform strategy and developer program. Motorola are committed to 4 target groups/platforms: mass market=AJAR platform; feature/iconic=MOTOMAGX Linux platform; multimedia=UIQ Symbian platform and enterprise=Windows Mobile platform.

Simon Walker and Asokan Thiyagarajan - A talk about Motorola's Java ME strategy. Good news is Motorola are fully behind Java ME. They are leads of the MIDP 3 spec and are building a fully functional reference implementation which will be made available as soon as the spec is finalised. Expect some new Java ME features on the Motodev website soon, this includes a full downloadable device list with JSR support information. Motorola will also provide the developer community with free application certificates for development purposes. Motodev studio is an Eclipse based IDE for Motorola Java ME development.

Mahad Ayalur and Rafael Camargo - A talk about Motorola's MOTOMAGX Linux platform and strategy. Motorola believe in open source and hope this platform will play a major role in their future. The kernel and stack will be kept as up to date as possible making the best use of open source projects. Motorola currently use Trolltech's QT 2.3 UI on their Linux handsets but they are going to be using a different UI for the next generation of devices. A full Eclipse based SDK is on the way for native C/C++ development. MIDP 3 will replace MIDP 2 as soon as the spec is finalised. Motorola currently use Sun's JVM on the Linux platform. The Web UI (based on WebKit) currently supports AJAX functionality but starting from 2009 this platform will be much more sophisticated and will provide JavaScript access to local device features (location, contacts, messages etc) and have support for off-line applications. Cool! An Eclipse based Web SDK will be available next year. Google's Android is open source and copy left so Motorola will obviously look carefully as to what components they can borrow from it for their own Linux stack.

Naresh Chouhan - About Symbian UIQ. A bit of a disappointing session. Not much to report other than UIQ have ramped up their team significantly over the last year. I left frustrated because a number of developers in the room complained about UIQ 3 backward compatibility (a supposed feature of the platform) and one of the UIQ people dismissed a developer complaining about how a newer version of UIQ changed the placement of their command buttons by saying "as long as your applications work, it's fine".... talk about not getting it at all!! After the de rigeur iPhone question they claimed it was having a halo effect for them and was generating new interest for an open touch screen platform.

As I said earlier, I left early and missed the late afternoon sessions.