Sony Ericsson G700c

J

Jason Bibeau

Member
I just want to know if the phone I have will support Pleco. Its a great phone and does everything I need but the Chinese/English dictionary it comes with is lame. I would like to use Pleco.

My Phone
Sony Ericsson G700c with Synbian OS
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Unfortunately no, and we have no plans to release a Symbian version of Pleco - it's really hard to develop for and we're uncertain about its long-term prospects in light of increased competition from Linux-based OSes.
 
J

Jason Bibeau

Member
Thank you for the quick reply.

Have you thought of outsourcing the Symbian project? Partnering up with someone else? Maybe in China? With Symbian?...

Sorry to nag.

Its just that I'm not in a hurry to get a new phone. I just bought this one 2 months ago. I also worry that a Windows Mobile OS will be just as reliable as their PC OSes. I purposely avoided Windows when I bought my phone.

Good luck with your business!
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Outsourcing's not something I'm very enthusiastic about - I don't think it's possible to maintain quality that way, particularly not with a product like Pleco that requires so many little tiny design refinements. If we developed a Symbian version it would most likely be because we finally decided to take on VC money and developed a bunch of new platform versions using that, but with our current comparatively-limited resources we have to pick and choose our platforms and Symbian's pretty far down the list.

There's hope that we might support Symbian with a web-based version of Pleco, though, along with BlackBerry, Android, and some other platforms we're not eager to develop a native version for - see some other recent threads for more on that.
 
I

ipsi

状元
The alternative is to wait for the iPhone/iPod Touch version to come out - while buying an iPhone is a fairly large investment, buying an iPod Touch may be less so, and it's the only alternative to Windows Mobile that's still alive and supporting Pleco (Palm OS having gone the way of the dodo).
 
J

Jason Bibeau

Member
I think the ipod is too big. My phone is nice and compact. It also has room for the traditional keypad. I like that. Its a good phone. Its compatible with skype. Its compatible with a lot of software written in Java. I'm not a programmer so I may sound ignorant but what if you wrote the software in java???
 
I

ipsi

状元
Way too much work converting Pleco from C/C++ to Java, which Mike has mentioned in other threads. It also creates all sorts of wonderful maintainability problems: every bug would have to be found and fixed twice - once in the C code, and once in the Java code, along with having to code every new feature twice (again, once for C and once for Java). Add to that the probable lack of a touch screen, and the amount of work to convert Pleco to run on Symbian is pretty insane - possibly a couple of years of development time...

EDIT: Assuming that phone runs Symbian. If it doesn't, then I'm not even sure if the processor speed and memory are sufficient to support Pleco...

EDIT 2: Not trying to say bad things about your choice of phone or anything, just pointing out that Pleco is quite resource-intensive for a Mobile application.
 
J

Jason Bibeau

Member
Thanks for the informative reply. Some of it was beyond my comprehension but I'm sure this thread will be helpful to those with similar questions. Good day :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top